After referring to the two former occasions when he had visited that historic shaft, when his father had spoken there, he added, “I now stand again at its base, and renew once more, on this national altar, vows, not for the first time made, of devotion to my country, its Constitution and Union.”

With these words upon his lips, with these sentiments in his heart, and in the hearts of the thousand brave men of his command, Colonel Webster went forth, the dauntless champion and willing martyr of the Union.  Except that the death of a beloved daughter brought him back for a few days to his family in the following summer, the people of Massachusetts saw his living face no more.

On the thirtieth of August, 1862, the second day of the second battle of Bull Run, late in the afternoon, while gallantly directing the movements of his regiment, and giving his orders in those clear, firm, ringing tones, which, in the tumult of battle, fall so gratefully on the soldier’s ear, Colonel Webster was shot through the body; and the Federal forces being closely pressed at the time, he was left to die on the field in Confederate hands.  As the event became known through the country, thousands of generous hearts, in the South as well as in the North, recalled the peroration of his father’s reply to Hayne, and bitterly regretted that, when his eyes were turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, it had been his unhappy lot to “see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union, on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent, on a land rent with internal feuds, and drenched [as then it was] with fraternal blood.”

In the time-honored song of Roland, we are told, “Count Roland lay under a pine-tree dying, and many things came to his remembrance.”  As it was with Count Roland in Spain, so it was with Colonel Webster in Virginia.  In the multitude of memories which rushed upon him as he lay dying on that ill-starred battle-field, we may be sure that Boston, Bunker Hill, and the home and grave of Marshfield, were not forgotten.

The body of Colonel Webster was willingly given up by the Confederates, and after lying in state in Faneuil Hall, and adding another to the immortal recollections which ennoble “the cradle of liberty,” it was buried near his father’s grave by the sea.

The Grand Army Post at Brockton, containing survivors of the Webster Regiment, has adopted Colonel Webster’s name; and on each Memorial Day, members of this Post make a pilgrimage to Marshfield to decorate his grave.  His life is remarkable for its apparent possibilities rather than for its actual achievements,—­for the capabilities which were recognized in him, rather than for what he accomplished, either in public or professional life.  His military career was cut short by a Confederate bullet before opportunity demonstrated that capacity for high command, which his superior officers, as well as his soldiers, believed him to possess.  The instincts of the soldier are often as trustworthy as the judgment of the commander.  All his soldiers loved him,—­