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This music of the glad march, these banners of pride and beauty, these memories so fragrant, these resolutions of patriotism so thoughtful, these hands pressed, these congratulations and huzzaings and tears, this great heart throbbing audibly, are they not hers, and do they not assure us? These forests of masts, these singing workshops of labor, these fields and plantations whitening for the harvest, this peace and plenty, this sleeping thunder, these bolts in the closed, strong talon, do not they tell us of her health, her strength, and her future? This shadow that flits across our grasses and is gone, this shallow ripple that darkens the surface of our broad and widening stream, and passes away, this little perturbation which our telescopes cannot find, and which our science can hardly find, but which we know cannot change the course or hasten the doom of one star; have these any terror for us? And He who slumbers not, nor sleeps, who keeps watchfully the city of his love, on whose will the life of nations is suspended, and to whom all the shields of the earth belong, our fathers' God, is he not our God, and of whom, then, and of

what shall we be afraid?

SPEECH ON THE BIRTHDAY OF DANIEL

WEBSTER, JANUARY 21, 1859.

[THE seventy-seventh anniversary of the birthday of Daniel Webster was commemorated by a banquet at the Revere House. At the conclusion of the feast, and after the opening address by the president of the day, Hon. Caleb Cushing, Mr. Choate, being called upon, spoke as follows:]

I WOULD not have it supposed for a moment that I design to make any eulogy, or any speech, concerning the great man whose birthday we have met to observe. I hasten to assure you that I shall attempt to do no such thing. There is no longer need of it, or fitness for it, for any purpose. Times have been when such a thing might have been done with propriety. While he was yet personally among us, while he was yet walking in his strength in the paths or ascending the heights of active public life, or standing upon them, and so many of the good and wise, so many of the wisest and best of our country, from all parts of it, thought he had title to the great office of our system, and would have had him formally presented for it, it was fit that those who loved and honored him should publicly, with effort, with passion, with argument, with contention, recall the series of his services, his life of elevated labors, finished and unfinished, display his large qualities of character and mind, and compare him, somewhat, in all these things, with the great men, his competitors for the great prize. Then was there a battle to be fought, and it was needful to fight it.

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And so, again, in a later day, while our hearts were yet bleeding with the sense of recent loss, and he lay newly dead

in his chamber, and the bells were tolling, and his grave was open, and the sunlight of an autumn day was falling on that long funeral train, I do not say it was fit only, it was unavoidable, that we all, in some choked utterance and some imperfect, sincere expression, should, if we could not praise the patriot, lament the man.

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But these times have gone by. The race of honor and duty is for him all run. The high endeavor is made, and it is finished. The monument is builded. He is entered into his glory. The day of hope, of pride, of grief, has been followed by the long rest; and the sentiments of grief, pride, and hope, are all merged in the sentiment of calm and implicit veneration. We have buried him in our hearts. is enough to say. Our estimation of him is part of our creed. We have no argument to make or hear upon it. We enter into no dispute about him. We permit no longer any man to question us as to what he was, what he had done, how much we loved him, how much the country loved him, and how well he deserved it. We admire, we love, and we are still. Be this enough for us to say.

Is it not enough that we just stand silent on the deck of the bark fast flying from the shore, and turn and see, as the line of coast disappears, and the headlands and hills and all the land go down, and the islands are swallowed up, the great mountain standing there in its strength and majesty, supreme and still to see how it swells away up from the subject and fading vale? to see that, though clouds and tempests, and the noise of waves, and the yelping of curs, may be at its feet, eternal sunshine has settled upon its head?

There is another reason why I should not trust myself to say much more of him to-night. It does so happen that you cannot praise Mr. Webster for that which really characterized and identified him as a public man, but that you seem to be composing a tract for the times.

It does so happen that the influence of his whole public life and position was so pronounced-so to speak-so defined, sharp, salient; the spirit of his mind, the tone of his mind, was so unmistakable and so peculiar; the nature of the public man was so transparent and so recognized everywhere, that you cannot speak of him without seeming to grow polemical, with

out seeming to make an attack upon other men, upon organizations, upon policy, upon tendencies. You cannot say of him what is true, and what you know to be true, but you are thought to be disparaging or refuting somebody else.

In this way there comes to be mingled with our service of the heart something of the discordant, incongruous, and temporary. So it is everywhere. They could not keep the birthday of Charles James Fox, but they were supposed to attack the grave of Pitt, and aim at a Whig administration and a reform bill. An historian can hardly admire the architecture of the age of Pericles, or find some palliation of the trial of Socrates, but they say he is a Democrat, a Chartist, or a friend of the secret ballot. The marvellous eloquence, and noble, patriotic enterprise of our Everett, can scarcely escape such misconstruction of small jealousy.

Yes; sad it is, but true, that you cannot say here to-night what you think, what you know, what you thank God for, about the Union-loving heart, the Constitution-defending brain, the moderation-breathing spirit, the American nature of the great man, our friend, but they call out you are thinking of them! So powerful is the suggestion of contrast, and such cowards does conscience make of all bad men!

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I feel the effect of this embarrassment. I protest against such an application of anything I say. But I feel, also, that it will be better than such a protest, to sum up in the briefest and plainest and soberest expression, what I deem will be the record of history, let me hope, with the immunities of history, concerning this man, as a public man.

He was, then, let me say, of the very foremost of great American Statesmen. This is the class of greatness in which he is to be ranked. As such, always, he is to be judged. What he would have been in another department of thought; how high he would have risen under other institutions; what he could have done if politics had not turned him from calm philosophy aside; whether he were really made for mankind, and to America gave up what was meant for mankind; how his mere naked intellectual ability compared with this man's or that, is a needless and vain speculation.

I may, however, be allowed to say that, although I have

seen him act, and heard him speak, and give counsel, in very high and very sharp and difficult crises, I always felt that if more had been needed more would have been done, and that half his strength or all his strength he put not forth. I never saw him make what is called an effort without feeling that, let the occasion be what it would, he would have swelled out to its limits. There was always a reservoir of power of which you never sounded the depths, certainly never saw the bottom; and I cannot well imagine any great historical and civil occasion to which he would not have brought, and to which he would not be acknowledged to have brought, an adequate ability. He had wisdom to have guided the counsels of Austria as Metternich did, if he had loved absolutism as well; skill enough and eloquence enough to have saved the life of Louis the Sixteenth, if skill and eloquence could have done it; learning, services, character, and dignity enough for a Lord Chancellor of England, if wisdom in counsel and eloquence in debate would have been titles to so proud a distinction.

But his class is that of American Statesmen. In that class he is to find his true magnitude. As he stood there he is to take his place forever in our system. To that constellation he has gone up, to that our telescopes or our naked eye are to be directed, and there I think he shines with a large and unalterable glory.

In every work regard the writer's end. In every life regard

the actor's end.

In saying this I do not mean to ignore or disparage his rank, also, in the profession of the law. In that profession he labored, by that he lived, of that he was proud, to that he brought vast ability and exquisite judgment, and in that he rose at last to the leadership of the bar. But I regard that, rather, as a superinduced, collateral, accessional fame, a necessity of greatness, a transcendent greatness, certainly; but it was not the labor he most loved, it was not the fame which attracts so many pilgrims to his tomb, and stirs so many hearts when his name is sounded. There have been Bacons, and Clarendons, and one Cicero, and one Demosthenes, who were lawyers. But they are not the Bacons, the Clarendons, they are not the Cicero and the Demosthenes of historical fame.

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