the title of
"Congressional Debates,"--a collection of printed matter which members
of Congress are wont to send to a favored few among their constituents,
and which are immediately consigned to the dust-barrel or sold to
pedlers in waste paper, according as the rage of the recipients takes a
scornful or an economical direction. It would seem that the speeches of
Webster are saved from this fate, by the fact that, in them, the mental
and moral life of a great man, and of a great master of the English
language, are organized in a palpable intellectual form. The reader
feels that they have some of the substantial qualities which he
recognizes in looking at the gigantic constructions of the master
workmen among the crowd of the world's engineers and architects, in
looking at the organic products of Nature herself, and in surveying,
through the eye of his imagination, those novel reproductions of Nature
which great poets have embodied in works which are indelibly stamped
with the character of deathlessness.

But Webster is even more obviously a poet--subordinating "the shows of
things to the desires of the mind"--in his magnificent idealization, or
idolization, of the Constitution and the Union. By the magic of his
imagination and sensibility he contrived to impress on the minds of a
majority of the people of the free States a vague, grand idea that the
Constitution was a sacred instrument of government,--a holy shrine of
fundamental law, which no unhallowed hands could touch without
profanation,--a digested system of rights and duties, resembling those
institutes which were, in early times, devised by the immortal gods for
the guidance of infirm mortal man; and the mysterious creatures, half
divine and half human, who framed this remarkable document, were always
reverently referred to as "the Fathers,"--as persons who excelled all
succeeding generations in sagacity and wisdom; as inspired prophets, who
were specially selected by Divine Providence to frame the political
scriptures on which our political faith was to be based, and by which
our political reason was to be limited. The splendor of the glamour thus
cast over the imaginations and sentiments of the people was all the more
effective because it was an effluence from the mind of a statesman who,
of all other statesmen of the country, was deemed the most practical,
and the least deluded by any misguiding lights of fancy and abstract
speculation.

There can be little