Many illustrations of these remarks may be found in the following volumes. We may refer particularly to the address to the survivors of the Revolution and the apostrophe to Warren in the first discourse on Bunker Hill. These were topics too obvious and essential, in an address on laying the corner-stone of the monument, to have been omitted in the orator's notes prepared beforehand. But no one will think that the entire apostrophe to Warren, as it stands in the reported speech, was elaborated in the closet and committed to memory. In fact there is a slight grammatical inaccuracy, caused by passing from the third person to the second in the same sentence, which is at once the natural consequence and the proof of an unpremeditated expansion or elevation of the preconceived idea. We see the process. When the sentence commenced, "But, ah! him!" it was evidently in the mind of the orator to close it by saying, "How shall I speak of him?" But in the progress of the sentence, forgetful, unconscious, of the grammatical form, but melting with the thought, beholding, as he stood upon the spot where the hero fell, his beloved and beautiful image rising from the ground, he can no longer speak of him. Willing subject of his own witchery, he clothes his conception with sensible forms, and speaks _to_ the glorious being whom he has called back to life. He no longer attempts to discourse of Warren to the audience, but passing, after a few intervening clauses, from the third person to the second, he exclaims, "How shall I struggle with the emotions that stifle the utterance of _thy_ name! Our poor work may perish, but thine shall endure! This monument may moulder away; the solid ground it rests upon may sink down to a level with the sea; but thy memory shall not fail!" FOOTNOTES [9] Mr. Webster makes the following playful allusion to this circumstance in a speech at a public dinner in Syracuse (New York), in the month of May of the present year:-- "It has so happened that all the public services which I have rendered in the world, in my day and generation, have been connected with the general government. I think I ought to make an exception. I was ten days a member of the Massachusetts legislature, and I turned my thoughts to the search for some good object in which I could be useful in that position; and, after much reflection, I introduced a bill which, with the general consent of both houses of the Massachusetts legislature, passed into a law, and is now a law of the State, which enacts that no man in the State shall catch trout in any other manner than in the old way, with an ordinary hook and line." [10] The leading ideas in this and the following paragraph may be found in a review of Mr. Webster's Speeches, in the North American Review, Vol. XLI. p. 241, written by the author of this Memoir. CHAPTER V.