it from any quarter, whether the Nullifiers of
South Carolina or the Abolitionists of the North. It is this thought
which gives grandeur and elevation to all his utterances, and
especially to the wonderful peroration of his _Reply to Hayne_, on Mr.
Foot's resolution touching the sale of the public lands, delivered in
the Senate on January 26, 1830, whose closing words, "Liberty and
union, now and forever, one and inseparable," became the rallying cry
of a great cause. Similar in sentiment was his famous speech of March
7, 1850, _On the Constitution and the Union_, which gave so much
offense to the extreme Antislavery party, who held with Garrison that a
Constitution which protected slavery "was a league with death and a
covenant with hell." It is not claiming too much for Webster to assert
that the sentences of these and other speeches, memorized and declaimed
by thousands of school-boys throughout the North, did as much as any
single influence to train up a generation in hatred of secession, and
to send into the fields of the civil war armies of men animated with
the stern resolution to fight till the last drop of blood was shed,
rather than allow the Union to be dissolved.

The figure of this great senator is one of the most imposing in
American annals. The masculine force of his personality impressed
itself upon men of a very different stamp--upon the unworldly Emerson,
and upon the captious Carlyle, whose respect was not willingly accorded
to any contemporary, much less to a representative of American
democracy. Webster's looks and manner were characteristic. His form
was massive; his skull and jaw solid, the under-lip projecting, and the
mouth firmly and grimly shut; his complexion was swarthy, and his
black, deep-set eyes, under shaggy brows, glowed with a smoldering
fire. He was rather silent in society; his delivery in debate was
grave and weighty, rather than fervid. His oratory was massive, and
sometimes even ponderous. It may be questioned whether an American
orator of to-day, with intellectual abilities equal to Webster's--if
such a one there were--would permit himself the use of sonorous and
elaborate pictures like the famous period which follows: "On this
question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they
raised their flag against a power to which, for purposes of foreign
conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to
be compared--a power which has dotted o