thout
fatigue, and received without preparation. Mere celebrity, too, is
dazzling to some minds. While, therefore, this imposing person lived
among us, he was blindly worshipped by many, blindly hated by some,
calmly considered by very few. To this hour he is a great influence in
the United States. Perhaps, with the abundant material now accessible,
it is not too soon to attempt to ascertain how far he was worthy of
the estimation in which his fellow-citizens held him, and what place
he ought to hold in the esteem of posterity. At least, it can never be
unpleasing to Americans to recur to the most interesting specimen of
our kind that has lived in America since Franklin.

He could not have been born in a better place, nor of better stock,
nor at a better time, nor reared in circumstances more favorable to
harmonious development. He grew up in the Switzerland of America. From
a hill on his father's New Hampshire farm, he could see most of the
noted summits of New England. Granite-topped Kearsarge stood out in
bold relief near by; Mount Washington and its attendant peaks, not yet
named, bounded the northern horizon like a low, silvery cloud; and the
principal heights of the Green Mountains, rising near the Connecticut
River, were clearly visible. The Merrimack, most serviceable of
rivers, begins its course a mile or two off, formed by the union of
two mountain torrents. Among those hills, high up, sometimes near the
summits, lakes are found, broad, deep, and still; and down the sides
run innumerable rills, which form those noisy brooks that rush along
the bottom of the hills, where now the roads wind along, shaded by the
mountain, and enlivened by the music of the waters. Among these hills
there are, here and there, expanses of level country large enough for
a farm, with the addition of some fields upon the easier acclivities
and woodlands higher up. There was one field of a hundred acres upon
Captain Webster's mountain farm so level that a lamb could be seen on
any part of it from the windows of the house. Every tourist knows that
region now,--that wide, billowy expanse of dark mountains and vivid
green fields, dotted with white farm-houses, and streaked with silvery
streams. It was rougher, seventy years ago, secluded, hardly
accessible, the streams unbridged, the roads of primitive formation;
but the worst of the rough work had been done there, and the
production of superior human beings had become possible, before the