nation of 1850, as a fallen angel? No one can say fully, for we
touch here the mysteries of personality and of the spoken word. But
enough survives from the Webster legend, from his correspondence
and political and legal oratory, to bring us into the presence of a
superman. The dark Titan face, painted by such masters as Carlyle,
Hawthorne, and Emerson; the magical voice, remembered now but by a few
old men; the bodily presence, with its leonine suggestion of sleepy
power only half put forth--these aided Webster to awe men or allure them
into personal idolatry. Yet outside of New England he was admired rather
than loved. There is still universal recognition of the mental capacity
of this foremost lawyer and foremost statesman of his time. He was
unsurpassed in his skill for direct, simple, limpid statement; but he
could rise at will to a high Roman stateliness of diction, a splendid
sonorousness of cadence. His greatest public appearances were in the
Dartmouth College Case before the Supreme Court, the Plymouth, Bunker
Hill, and Adams-Jefferson commemorative orations, the Reply to Hayne,
and the Seventh of March speeches in the Senate. Though he exhibited in
his private life something of the prodigal recklessness of the pioneer,
his mental operations were conservative, constructive. His lifelong
antagonist Calhoun declared that "The United States are not a nation."
Webster, in opposition to this theory of a confederation of states,
devoted his superb talents to the demonstration of the thesis that the
United States "IS," not "are." Thus he came to be known as the typical
expounder of the Constitution. When he reached, in 1850, the turning
point of his career, his countrymen knew by heart his personal and
political history, the New Hampshire boyhood and education, the rise
to mastery at the New England bar, the service in the House of
Representatives and the Senate and as Secretary of State. His speeches
were already in the schoolbooks, and for twenty years boys had been
declaiming his arguments against nullification. He had helped to teach
America to think and to feel. Indeed it was through his oratory that
many of his fellow-citizens had gained their highest conception of the
beauty, the potency, and the dignity of human speech. And in truth he
never exhibited his logical power and demonstrative skill more superbly
than in the plea of the seventh of March for the preservation of the
status quo, for the avoidance of mutua