the cannon of Grant and Farragut than the thunder of Webster’s reply to Hayne. He knew not the extent of his own achievement. His greatest failure was that he rose not to the height and actual stroke of his own resistless argument, and that he lacked the sublime inspiration, the disentanglement and the courage to let the giant he had created go upon his errand, first of force, and then, through that, of surer peace. He had put the work and genius of more than an ordinary lifetime of service into the arching and knitting of the Union, and this he could not bear to put to the final test; his great heart was sincere in the prayer that his eyes might not behold the earthquake that would shake it to those foundations which, though he knew it not, he had made so strong that a succeeding generation saw them stand the shock as the oak withstands the storm. Men are not gods, and it needed in him that he should rise to a moral sublimity and daring as lofty as the intellectual heights above which he soared with unequaled strength. So had he been godlike. “A great man touches the heart of the people as well as their intelligence. They not only admire, they also love him. It sometimes seems as if they sought in him some weakness of our common human nature, that they may chide him for it, forgive it, and so endear him to themselves the more. Massachusetts had her friction with the younger Adams, only to lay him away with profounder honor, and to remember him devotedly as the defender of the right of petition and ‘the old man eloquent.’ She forgave the overweening conceit of Sumner, she revoked her unjust censure of him, and now points her youth to him in his high niche as the unsullied patriot, without fear and without reproach, who stood and spoke for equal rights, and whose last great service was to demand and enforce his country’s just claims against the dishonorable trespass of the cruisers of that England he had so much admired. Massachusetts smote, too, and broke the heart of Webster, her idol, and then broke her own above his grave, and to-day writes his name highest upon her roll of statesmen. It seems disjointed to say that, with such might as his, the impression that comes from his face upon the wall, as from his silhouette upon the background of our history, is that of sadness—the sadness of the great deep eyes, the sadness of the lonely shore he loved, and by which he sleeps. The story of Webster from the beginning is the very pathos of romance. A minor chord runs through it like the tenderest note in a song. What eloquence of tears is in that narrative, which reveals in this giant of intellectual strength the heart, the single loving heart, of a child, and in which he describes the winter sleighride up the New Hampshire hills when his father told him that, at whatever cost, he should have a college education, and he, too full to speak, while a warm glow ran all over him, laid his head upon his father’s shoulder and wept!