Not so with Daniel Webster, the greatest of American forensic orators, if, indeed, he be not the greatest of all orators who have used the English tongue.  Webster’s speeches are of the kind that have power to move after the voice of the speaker is still.  The thought and the passion in them lay hold on feelings of patriotism more lasting than the issues of the moment.  It is, indeed, true of Webster’s speeches, as of all speeches, that they are known to posterity more by single brilliant passages than as wholes.  In oratory the occasion is of the essence of the thing, and only those parts of an address which are permanent and universal in their appeal take their place in literature.  But of such detachable passages there are happily many in Webster’s orations.  One great thought underlay all his public life, the thought of the Union—­of American nationality.  What in Hamilton had been a principle of political philosophy had become in Webster a passionate conviction.  The Union was his idol, and he was intolerant of any faction which threatened it from any quarter, whether the Nullifiers of South Carolina or the Abolitionists of the North.  It is this thought which gives grandeur and elevation to all his utterances, and especially to the wonderful peroration of his Reply to Hayne, on Mr. Foot’s resolution touching the sale of the public lands, delivered in the Senate on January 26, 1830, whose closing words, “Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable,” became the rallying cry of a great cause.  Similar in sentiment was his famous speech of March 7, 1850, On the Constitution and the Union, which gave so much offense to the extreme Antislavery party, who held with Garrison that a Constitution which protected slavery “was a league with death and a covenant with hell.”  It is not claiming too much for Webster to assert that the sentences of these and other speeches, memorized and declaimed by thousands of school-boys throughout the North, did as much as any single influence to train up a generation in hatred of secession, and to send into the fields of the civil war armies of men animated with the stern resolution to fight till the last drop of blood was shed, rather than allow the Union to be dissolved.

The figure of this great senator is one of the most imposing in American annals.  The masculine force of his personality impressed itself upon men of a very different stamp—­upon the unworldly Emerson, and upon the captious Carlyle, whose respect was not willingly accorded to any contemporary, much less to a representative of American democracy.  Webster’s looks and manner were characteristic.  His form was massive; his skull and jaw solid, the under-lip projecting, and the mouth firmly and grimly shut; his complexion was swarthy, and his black, deep-set eyes, under shaggy brows, glowed with a smoldering fire.  He was rather silent in society; his delivery in debate was grave and weighty, rather than fervid.