fort and
leisure, and follow his vision whithersoever it led. Soon the vision
led him to the platform of Faneuil Hall, where an official was
justifying the murderers of Lovejoy. "Mr. Chairman," he said, "when I
heard the gentleman lay down principles which placed the murderers of
Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I
thought those pictured lips would have broken into voice to rebuke the
recreant American, the slanderer of the dead." And that vision lent
his words such burning eloquence that Wendell Phillips' speech in
Faneuil Hall ranks with Patrick Henry's at Williamsburg and Abraham
Lincoln's at Gettysburg--and there is no fourth. His vision led him
unto obloquy also. What revilings were his! What bitter hatred! What
insults and scoffs! At last the vision led him unto fame. The very
city that would have slain him builded his monument, and men who once
would not defile their lips with his name taught their children the
pathway to his tomb. It was that vision splendid that saved Phillips
from sodden contentment. Had Christ never crossed his path, his
imagination would have lost its brightest picture, his life its
noblest impulses, its most energetic forces.

And not only have visions power to shape young men's lives. To the
mature and the great also come dreams of ideal excellence, smiting
selfishness, rebuking sin, taking the sweetness out of sordid success,
and urging men on to higher achievements. The biographers have never
been able to fully account for the pathetic sadness and gloom of the
closing days of Daniel Webster. Horace Greeley once said that
"Webster's intellect is the greatest emanation from the Almighty mind
now embodied." For picturesque majesty and overpowering mentality he
is doubtless our most striking figure. That enormous and beautiful
head, those wonderful eyes, that stately carriage, that Jove-like
front, led men to call him "the godlike Daniel." When he appeared upon
the Strand in London a great crowd followed him, and a British
statesman described Webster as one describes a majestic landscape or
the sublimity of a mountain. But during the last years of his life his
face took on a strangely pathetic sorrow. With the language of a Dante
his biographer has pictured for us an Inferno, in which we see one,
sublime of reason, walking in the very prime and strength and grandeur
of full manhood, yet walking in a round of night, in a realm of
bitterness, ever gnawed by disa