n the battle-smoke, and it was his call more than any
other that rallied and kept us at the firing-line.

I think my mother told me once that on the canal-boat as we went West
in the thirties, we had Webster for a time as a fellow-passenger, who
good-naturedly patted the heads of the two little boys who then made
up her brood. I wish I could be sure that the hand of Webster had once
rested on my head. His early utterances as to slavery are warm with
humane feeling. I have come to feel that his humanity did not cool,
but he grew into the belief that agitation at the time would make sure
the destruction of the country, in his eyes the supreme calamity. The
injustice, hoary from antiquity, not recognised as injustice until
within a generation or two, might wait a generation or two longer
before we dealt with it. Let the evil be endured a while that the
greater evil might not come. I neither defend nor denounce him. I am
now only remembering; and what a stately and solemn image it is to
remember!

* * * * *

William H. Seward, unlike Webster, had the handicap of an unimpressive
exterior, nor had his voice the profound and conquering note which
is so potent an ally of the mind in subduing men. I heard Seward's
oration at Plymouth in 1855, a worthy effort which may be read in his
works, but I do better here to pick up only the straws, not meddling
with the heavy-garnered wheat. I recall an inconspicuous figure, of
ordinary stature, and a face whose marked feature was the large nose
(Emerson called it "corvine"), but that, as some one has said, is the
hook which nature makes salient in the case of men whom fortune is
to drag forward into leadership. He spoke in the pulpit of my
grandfather, who at the time had been for nearly sixty years minister
of the old Pilgrim parish. From that coign of vantage, my faithful
grandsire had no doubt smoked out many a sinner, and had not been
sparing of the due polemic fulminations in times of controversy. The
old theology, too, had undergone at his hands faithful fumigation to
make it sanitary for the modern generations. From one kind of smoke,
however, that venerable pulpit had been free until the hour of
Seward's arrival. It arched my eyebrows well when I saw him at the end
of his address light a cigar in the very shrine, a burnt-offering, in
my good grandfather's eyes certainly, more fitting for altars satanic.
My grandfather promptly called him down, gre