How often his loving defence of Massachusetts has been quoted! "Mr. President, I shall enter on no encomiums upon Massachusetts. She needs none. There she is--behold her, and judge for yourselves. There is her history: the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill,--and there they will remain forever. The bones of her sons, falling in the great struggle for Independence, now lie mingled with the soil of every State, from New England to Georgia; and there they will lie forever. And, sir, where American liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, in the strength of its manhood and full of its original spirit. If discord and disunion shall wound it--if party strife and blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it--if folly and madness, if uneasiness under salutary and necessary restraint, shall succeed to separate it from that union, by which alone its existence is made sure, it will stand, in the end, by the side of that cradle in which its infancy was rocked: it will stretch forth its arm, with whatever of vigor it may still retain, over the friends who gather round it; and it will fall at last, if fall it must, amidst the proudest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin. "When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood!--Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured--bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as _What is all this worth_? Nor those other words of delusion and folly, _Liberty first_, and _Union_ afterwards--but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart--Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!" Of course, this reply to Hayne electrified the country, and Webster began to be mentioned for the presidential chair. No one who ever heard him speak, with his wonderful magnetism, his majestic enthusiasm, his rich, full voice, and his unsurpassed physique, could ever forget the man, his words, or his presence. When he visited Europe, some said, "There goes a king." When Sydney Smith saw him, he exclaimed, "Good Heavens! he is a small cathedral by himself."