glance; and how
conflicting principles and statements, mixed and mingling in fierce
confusion and with deafening war-cries, fall into order and relation,
and move in the direction of one inexorable controlling idea, the
moment they are grasped by an intellect which is in the secret of their
combination:--

"Confusion hears his voice, and the wild uproar
stills."

Mark, too, how, in the productions of his mind, the presence and
pressure of his whole nature, in each intellectual act, keeps his
opinions on the level of his character, and stamps every weighty
paragraph with "Daniel Webster, his mark." The characteristic, of all
his great speeches is, that the statements, arguments, and images have
what we should call a positive being of their own,--stand out as plainly
to the sight as a ledge of rocks or chain of hills,--and, like the works
of Nature herself, need no other justification of their right to exist
than the fact of their existence. We may detest their object, but we
cannot deny their solidity of organization. This power of giving a
substantial body, an undeniable external shape and form, to his thoughts
and perceptions, so that the toiling mind does not so much seem to pass
from one sentence to another, unfolding its leading idea, as to
make each sentence a solid work in a Torres-Vedras line of
fortifications,--this prodigious constructive faculty, wielded with the
strength of a huge Samson-like artificer in the material of mind, and
welding together the substances it might not be able to fuse, puzzled
all opponents who understood it not, and baffled the efforts of all who
understood it well. He rarely took a position on any political question,
which did not draw down upon him a whole battalion of adversaries, with
ingenious array of argument and infinite noise of declamation; but after
the smoke and dust and clamor of the combat were over, the speech loomed
up, perfect and whole, a permanent thing in history or literature,
while the loud thunders of opposition had too often died away into low
mutterings, audible only to the adventurous antiquary who gropes in the
"still air" of stale "Congressional Debates." The rhetoric of sentences
however melodious, of aphorisms however pointed, of abstractions however
true, cannot stand in the storm of affairs against this true rhetoric,
in which thought is consubstantiated with things.

Now in men of this stamp, who have so organized knowledge into faculty
that th