oston and Cambridge, Lowell,
Longfellow, Norton, Holmes, Higginson, Father Taylor, Bancroft,
Everett, and others, with Webster standing out like a Colossus on the
New Hampshire granite. This crop of geniuses seems to have been the
aftermath of the Revolution. Will our social and industrial revolution
bring anything like another such a crop? Will the great World War
produce another? Until now too much prosperity, too much mammon, too
much "at ease in Zion" has certainly prevailed for another band of
great idealists to appear.

Emerson could never keep his eyes off Webster. He was fairly
hypnotized by the majesty and power of his mind and personality, and
he recurs to him in page after page of his Journal. Webster was of
primary stuff like the granite of his native hills, while such a man
as Everett was of the secondary formation, like the sandstone rocks.
Emerson was delighted when he learned that Carlyle, "with those
devouring eyes, with that portraying hand," had seen Webster. And this
is the portrait Carlyle drew of him: "As a Logic-fencer, Advocate, or
Parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him at first sight
against all the extant world. The tanned complexion, that amorphous,
crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows,
like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be _blown_; the
mastiff-mouth, accurately closed:--I have not traced as much of
_silent Berserkir-rage_, that I remember of, in any other man."

Emerson's description and praise and criticism of Webster form some of
the most notable pages in his Journal. In 1843, when Webster came to
Concord as counsel in a famous case that was tried there, the fact so
excited Emerson that he could not sleep. It was like the perturbation
of a planet in its orbit when a large body passes near it. Emerson
seems to have spent much time at the court-house to hear and study
him: "Webster quite fills our little town, and I doubt if I shall get
settled down to writing until he has well gone from the county. He is
a natural Emperor of men." He adjourned the court every day in true
imperial fashion, simply by rising and taking his hat and looking the
Judge coolly in the face, whereupon the Judge "bade the Crier adjourn
the Court." But when Emerson finally came to look upon him with the
same feeling with which he saw one of those strong Paddies of the
railroad, he lost his interest in the trial and did not return to the
court in the afternoon. "