In the House and in the Senate, sometimes on the same side, but oftener congenially opposed, yet ever divided from each other by rival ambitions, they ennobled the scenes in which they spent such large forces. The American Titans, they tossed heavy bars of logic with such ease, wrestled with such matching-power and balanced success, that we, growing up to the gigantic spectacles, almost lose the consciousness of the unwonted masteries that have so grandly played before us. And yet, somehow, for all this, comparatively little love gathers in our hearts as we look at those well-remembered faces; the large, continental visage of Henry Clay, mapping a hemisphere of vast thoughts and generous though partisan currents of action; the lofty sternness of John C. Calhoun, cast in a Cato-like mould, heroic and defiant; and the square-blocked, cubical, almost repulsive mass, outlined into the head of Daniel Webster, which looks, or rather is looked at, as if it had for several centuries capped the pyramid of Cheops, and had been finally taken down with state ceremonies and transplanted by the Pasha to America, as a testimony of his conception of our large exceptional growth. [Illustration: THE INTELLIGENT JURY. (p. 468) ] Sadder than a professed comedy or a prepared funeral oration over a rich but bad man is the unsatisfied ambition of such tough athletes in the political arena, who, after a long life of great rough play, break up into common earth, and form the subjects for Commencement day or prize compositions in an open grove, where young ladies in white, bound in blue-belting-ribbons, summon their uneasy ghosts before the dull-eyed umpires. From what a cold well-depth sprang to the curb of Webster’s lips those soliloquizing words which, a few days before his death, overflowed from a disappointed life. Sitting in an open doorway at Marshfield, propped up by pillows, he looked out upon his favorite herd of cattle, which were driven up for the last inspection of their attached owner. As the fine animals passed and turned their large eyes upon him,—some pausing and looking a fond recollection into his scarcely wasted face,—he ejaculated, as his thoughts turned backward over the slights of party and the disappointments of an unsatisfied life: “I love the honest faces of animals. _They_ look what they mean.”