The Brothers' War Part 7

WEBSTER

Calhoun was the pre-eminent champion of the southern cause in the union, while Toombs was that of southern nationalization seeking independence.

Webster was the pre-eminent champion of American nationalization seeking continental union. Toombs and Webster are therefore in ant.i.thesis; and it will be well for me to begin the chapter by antic.i.p.ating some of the characteristics of the former, who will be treated at large later on, and briefly contrasting the two.

By nature Toombs was so p.r.o.ne to action that even in his daily recreation--talk with the nearest to him was by far the most of it--his immense and tireless outpouring of fine phrase, wisdom, and wit was the increasing wonder of all who knew him. Webster's p.r.o.neness was to repose, almost indolence. He often seemed lethargic. His activity could be excited only by the pressure of necessity. This difference between the two showed itself very markedly in their several careers. Toombs, coming to the bar in the last year of his nonage, took the profession at once to his heart, settled in his native county, in a lucrative field of practice, overcame all hindrances of natural defects and insufficient training seemingly by a mere act of will, and in four or five years his collecting a thousand-dollar fee in an adjoining county was no very uncommon thing.

When he was twenty-eight he was a fully developed lawyer and advocate on every side--law, equity, and criminal--of the courts of that prosperous planting community, then overrunning with cases of importance, and his annual income from practice was $15,000. Webster went up much more slowly.

He read long and industriously; was not called until he was twenty-three; for the next two and a half years was content with an income of $600 or $700; and then for nine years at Portsmouth his average income was $2,000 yearly. Even when Webster at thirty-four removed to Boston he was hardly as a lawyer the equal of Toombs at twenty-eight; and I believe that the latter was always the superior lawyer. The greater reputation of Webster is due to the greater reputation of his cases, and of the tribunal wherein he long held the lead.

We see a like difference between the two in congress. Webster s.h.i.+rks the routine duties of his place to gain opportunity for practice in the United States supreme court. Toombs stays away from all courts during the session, and gives every measure before the body to which he belongs its proper attention, study, and labor. But the performance by him of all the many duties of representative or senator, whether little or great, with unparalleled diligence, ability, and splendor, has been so completely obscured by the few of Webster's great congressional exploits, that it is not now cared for by anybody.

The greater lawyer and the greater congressman has been accorded the lesser renown. This is because of the relation which each one bore to the two publics which I have tried to make you understand,--the southern public and the northern public. Toombs's legal career was mainly in the courts of his own State. It was not much heard of outside, in even the southern public, until his extraordinarily meritorious discharge of congressional duties involving a mastery of law was observed. Although some of Webster's cases in State courts were celebrated, his greatest ones, to be considered in a moment, were won in the United States supreme court, in the eyes of both publics watching intently. The highest accomplishments of Toombs in the non-sectional parts of his congressional career were almost matters of indifference at the time to both publics, becoming steadily more absorbed in pro- and anti-slavery politics; and what he did in the other part of it excited the hostility of the northern public, and brought him obloquy instead of good name. The few memorable deeds of Webster in congress were victorious vindications of the cause clearest of all to the northern, that is, the free-labor, public. That public has at last not only conquered, but it has annexed the other as a part of itself. And so Toombs's fame as a lawyer and statesman has been left so far behind that it can hardly hope ever to have impartial and fair comparison with that of Webster.

Just one more parallel, and I shall proceed with my sketch. Each one of the two, in order to accept his mission of leaders.h.i.+p, was plainly made by his destiny to abandon a previously cherished doctrine for a new and contrary one. Toombs was once an ardent union man, Webster was once almost a secessionist. In his Taylor speech, made in the United States house of representatives July 1, 1848, speaking of the then expected acquisition of territory, Toombs said:

"All the rest of this continent is not worth our glorious union, much less these contemptible provinces which now threaten us with such evils. It were better that we should throw back the worthless boon, and let the inhabitants work out their own destiny, than that we should endanger our peace, our safety, and our nationality by their incorporation in our union."

The silly embargo measures, making war upon our own citizens instead of our enemies, had deeply injured New England interests. On their heel came the second war with England, into which the government of France had, as Mr. Lodge says, "tricked us ... by most profligate lying."[66] This war paralyzed the production and occupations of Webster's people.

A speech made by him July 4, 1812, is "a strong, calm statement of the grounds of opposition to the war."[67] Mr. Lodge quotes and emphasizes a pa.s.sage as proof that Webster, although a federalist, and the majority of his party in New England were--to use the words of the same author--"prepared to go to the very edge of the narrow legal line which divides const.i.tutional opposition from treasonable resistance,"[68] was then standing by the union with might and main. This quotation, separated from its circ.u.mstances and the immediate sequel, strongly supports the contention. The speech being printed, circulated widely among those federalists who were gravitating so strongly towards "treasonable resistance." By reason of it Webster was chosen as a delegate to a convention, held the next month. This man, whom Mr. Lodge would have us believe to be so fixedly counter to the then uppermost revolutionary sentiment of his party, was chosen to be their mouthpiece. He wrote their report--the "Rockingham Memorial" in the form of a letter to President Madison. Mr. Lodge thus contrasts the report and the speech. "In one point the memorial differed curiously from the oration of the month before. The latter pointed to the suffrage as the mode of redress; the former distinctly hinted at and almost threatened secession, even while it deplored a dissolution of the union as a possible result of the administration's policy."[69] Then the biographer most confidently states that in the speech Webster was declaring his own views, but in the other doc.u.ment he was declaring those of members of his party.

But the average American will be sure that those familiar with the speech at the time did not strain its counsels as far away from their own as Mr.

Lodge does, otherwise they would not have elected him as delegate; and further, he never would have made their report for them unless he had been known to entertain their own sentiments.[70]

The popular wave that he had thus mounted carried the draftsman of the "Rockingham Memorial" into congress, where, while British armies were actually treading our soil, he voted against the taxes proposed for national defence. Mr. Lodge does not go the full length of sustaining this conduct.[71] The severe comment of another biographer will be cordially approved by average readers, northern and southern.[72]

The facts properly considered show that from the speech of July 4, 1812, on, Webster, although he stood aloof from the Hartford convention movement, was in full sympathy with the federalists of New England, whom the national government by its unrighteous oppressions had driven to contemplate disunion as a possible measure of self-protection.

This att.i.tude of Webster towards the union was entirely contrary to that which afterwards became his power and glory among his countrymen. We wish it noted that as he changed with the people of New England from anti-tariff to pro-tariff politics, he likewise changed with them in their principles as to the union; and that Toombs went with the south, in an opposite direction, that is, from embrace to rejection of the union.

Having in the foregoing brought out the prominent characteristics of Webster's nature and career, and having also impressed you that he, like all other great statesmen, could lead only by following his people, I will cursorily trace him from stage to stage through his development. He was selected in infancy, if not before by providence, to be made not the expounder of the const.i.tution, but the invincible defender of the union.

When his activity begins, he is at first to consolidate the union by the management of some great law cases, and delivery of occasional addresses to popular a.s.semblies; and afterwards in his high place as United States senator he is to demonstrate to the northern public its complete guaranty of their highest material interests, and set it in their hearts above all things else. Thus did providence a.s.sign to him the preservation of the greatest of all democracies, to the end that there be no break in the future course of human improvement.

Before his activity begins the powers train him. They gave him a long education, and a slow growth as a statesman. He could never remember when he had been unable to read. His feeble physique while a child s.h.i.+elded him from the labor required of the other children, and permitted him to enjoy books. Early he soaked his mind in the King James version of the bible and other good English standards. As he grew apace his opportunities of reading were far better than those of Calhoun, who never saw even a circulating library until he was in his thirteenth year, and soon was taken away from that. These opportunities he used in his leisurely way.

His mind was strong and his memory good, and he digested and kept under command what he read. His schooling and college course were in the main continuous. He got to Dartmouth at fifteen, where he spent four years.

Here he made the reputation of being the best speaker and writer of all the students. In his study for the law he took ample time. And in his first years of practice he had much leisure. Besides revelling in the Latin cla.s.sics, Shakspeare, Milton, Pope, and Cowper, and much history, he was keenly observant of what was going on about him. We know how Jeremiah Mason gave him lessons both in law, rhetoric, and elocution to his great advancement. We know too that his interest in current political questions was vigilant. He took his seat in congress May, 1813, being then a little over thirty-one. His speech against a bill to encourage enlistments made January 14, the next year, shows, as Mr. Lodge says, that "he was now master of the style at which he aimed."[73] Of this peculiar style I shall say something after a while. Mention of his greatest exploits in consolidating the union is now in order.

The first of these is his conduct of the Dartmouth college case in the United States supreme court. It is entirely out of place for me to give even the briefest notice of the details which fill Mr. s.h.i.+rley's unique book.[74] Little more than emphasis of the effect of the decision to knit more closely the bonds of union between the States is required. This effect will be considered more carefully when we comment on Gibbons _v._ Ogden, which finishes the important work commenced in the other. It needs only to remind the reader now that the protection of contracts against impairing State legislation has contributed probably more than anything else to the prosperous development of American internal trade and commerce,--a most potent factor in consolidating the union,--and that this protection originates in the Dartmouth college decision. But there is something special to be said of Webster as to the case. He did not stress the const.i.tutional point--that upon which the judgment was finally placed--either in his law-brief or argument. The victory is all due to his consummate management of the court, especially of the chief-justice. The latter really found the true ground of the decision. But the powers had Webster in hand, and it suited their purposes to crown their _Liebling_ with the credit of the decision. When he found out the reasons given for the ruling he had won, I fancy that a good angel of his destiny whispered in his ear he ought to have discerned that the weal of all cla.s.ses of his entire country, and not merely that of its colleges, was at stake in his case, and he must never in the future overlook such an opportunity again.

In his Hanover fourth of July speech, made when he was only eighteen years old, to quote from the authority we make so much use of, "the boy Webster preached love of country, the grandeur of American nationality, fidelity to the const.i.tution as the bulwark of nationality, and the necessity and the n.o.bility of the union of the States."[75] Mr. Lodge impressively adds, "and that was the message which the man Webster delivered to his fellow men."[76] His Fryeburg fourth of July speech, made not long afterwards, was in the same strain. After the powers had thus started him in the way they wanted him to go, we have noted above how he was carried by the federalists of New England into a movement hostile to the union. This brief wandering from his destiny, as it were, is to be compared with his neglect to grasp the point in the Dartmouth college case which was in the exact line of that high destiny. This shows how even the greatest genius must stumble and grope before it has found the right road. I think the Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, First Part of Henry VI, and the Sonnets of Shakspeare are like examples.

The Plymouth oration, delivered in 1820, begins a new and very important stage of Webster's career. As Virginia was the mother of the southern States, so New England was in large measure the mother of the northern.

The latter was the very fountain of the free-labor nationalization. And as she was known to be exceptionally advanced in intellectual as well as material development, she was to all the free States both their great example and highest authority. Hardly anybody has even yet fully taken in all the permanent good which New England has done for herself at home and for her children and scholars outside. Of course still less of it was understood in 1820. But in the Plymouth oration Webster set forth so much of it, the effect upon New England was magical. It was as if he had raised a curtain concealing great riches and treasures of her merit and glory, the existence of which had not been suspected. New Englanders all fell in love with him, and accorded him the foremost place among their counsellors.

The anti-slavery spirit of the speech deserves special notice. I do not mean to emphasize the oft-quoted pa.s.sage denouncing the African slave-trade; for everybody in the south--even the smuggler and the few purchasers who encouraged him--had been against legalizing it, for reasons mentioned above, from a time long before the southern States showed a desire in the const.i.tutional convention to stop the trade at once. I mean his mention of slavery in the West Indies. I do not think that he had the south in mind, stressing as he does the absenteeism of the masters and the mortgages of their lands for capital borrowed in England. But much else that he says of the evil effects of slavery could be easily applied, at least in some measure, to the system as it then existed in the south, such as, for instance, the backwardness to make permanent improvements or endow colleges. His contrast of New England with the West Indies is intended to show that a free-labor community is far superior to a slave-labor community in the most important elements of a good and progressive civilization. His conviction of this truth is serious and undoubting. And those few words, "the unmitigated toil of slavery," which show that he erroneously believed that the slave toiled as hard as the wage-earning laborer, evince a strong moral revulsion on his part.

We summarize as to the Plymouth oration. It made Webster really the political leader of New England, which--the animosity excited by the embargo and the late war having become a forgotten thing of the past--is now both in command of and also in the van of the free-labor and anti-slavery nationalization, destined by the powers to perpetuate the union.

We have told you how Webster--being at the time the very antipodes of what he was afterwards when he talked with Bosworth as to the Rhode Island case--missed the true and cardinal point in the Dartmouth college case, and how the powers, after having Marshall to establish it, gave all the glory of the great accomplishment to Webster. We come now to Gibbons _v._ Ogden, argued in 1824, in which the latter made far more than ample amends for his shortcoming, and taught even the great Marshall how to decide.

New York State had given Fulton and Livingston for a term exclusive steam navigation of all its waters, and Webster was to maintain that the grant impugned the federal const.i.tution and was therefore invalid. The question was _res integra_, without a.n.a.logies which often help us forlorn advocates who cannot find a precedent and are utterly without any literature suggesting the _ratio decidendi_. I know I cannot explain to a layman how such cases as these bewilder and paralyze the typical Anglo-American judge, who has walked all his life by precedent and not by sight. Further, Webster's side antagonized prevailing sentiment and, it would be hardly too much to say, the public conscience; either one of which generally sways courts more powerfully than the law-brief, argument, and appeal of complete advocates. The only thing which Webster could oppose to these formidable odds was just a clause of a sentence of the const.i.tution, this clause being only of twelve words when even the belonging context is read into it,[77] and appearing to be, we cannot say surplusage, but neither well-considered nor of any particular force. Out of this he constructed such a perfect and wise doctrine of the immunity of our interstate commerce from local attack and restraint that every succeeding generation has admired its wisdom more, and subsequent additions and extensions of importance are all manifest conclusions from the promises which he made good.

Reading and reflecting for writing my "American Law Studies" familiarized me with a few instances in which a man has left a lasting impress upon the development of the law (some of which instances will be mentioned in a moment). Thus I was led to meditate Webster's work in this case; and it becomes an increasing wonder to me. Read what his biographer tells of the unfavorable circ.u.mstances of the preparation for the argument and how he overcame them by superhuman effort. Read also his own account as given by Harvey, how Wirt, his a.s.sociate, older and of much more experience in that court, disparaged the ground upon which he said he should stand, and proposed another; and how Marshall drank in every word of Webster's argument, and afterwards virtually reproduced it in the opinion.

But the great thing is what he did for the law. The current distribution of the common law under its larger heads was made by Hale and Blackstone after that of the contemporary civilians, which is founded upon that of the Inst.i.tutes of Justinian. This book is but a reproduction of that of Gaius. So we may a.s.sert of this last mentioned author that it is his systematization which still obtains both in the English and Roman law, that is to say, the entire law of the enlightened world.[78] A few English chancellors perceptibly moulded equity; Mansfield almost created English commercial law; in our country, Hamilton, in one argument overturned the doctrine of tacking securities, and in another remade the essentials of libel; our great text-author Bishop, with his treatise often worked over in new editions, is really the enacter of the American law of divorce; and Marshall's additions to our federal law will never be forgotten. By what he did in Gibbons _v._ Ogden, Webster has won a proud place in the small company of great law-givers.

And he is ent.i.tled to a liberal share of the glory which the Dartmouth college decision has won, for without him Marshall would have had no opportunity.

To estimate the prodigious effect of the rulings in these two cases, try to realize to yourself what would be the consequences to American trade and commerce if the States were not effectually kept from infringing contracts or granting monopolies of transportation. Try to realize the loss, the inconvenience, the trouble, the vexation, all the evil that would have unavoidably befallen us if these two companion decisions and the subsequent ones following them as precedents or extending them as a.n.a.logies, had not made practically the whole of American inland business a unit--to use Webster's word--under the protection everywhere of the same impartial law. The longer you think it over the more confirmed will be your opinion that from no other cause has the evolution away from the old independence of States towards a permanent union and a single organism of perpetually federated communities been more furthered. The unification of production and distribution thus given resistless impulse has almost of itself alone worked the unification of all our States. So looking back from the standpoint of to-day we may be sure that the powers had Webster by his accomplishment in the cases now in mind, to build for perpetual union far better than he knew.

It needs not to dwell upon the Bunker Hill oration, made June 17, 1825. It is, as I believe, the most familiar as a whole of all speeches to Americans. It did not stop with adding greatly to the influence he had won over New England by the Plymouth oration; it revealed him to the whole country as its supreme orator. Bear in mind its theme, remembering how large a part the battle of Bunker Hill was in founding our union.

The plainest manifestation that providence ever made of its favoritism to Webster was its having Adams and Jefferson both to die on the same day of all the year the most commemorative of each. By the eulogy of the two patriots which Webster made the next month he attained the height of his popular celebrity. His subject was no longer one that princ.i.p.ally concerned New England and the north, but it was the co-operation of both sections in making the United States. Slowly, but surely, he has climbed to the top of authority, whence he ever draws audience and attention from north and south, both in the present and for ages after the brothers' war.

These three popular speeches just noticed are unique in oratory, not in their general character, but in the n.o.bility of the subjects, the ripeness of the occasion, the profound wisdom of treatment, and the extraordinary elevation and perfection of style.

Another stage begins in 1830 with the reply to Hayne. What Webster says therein, recommending brotherly love between the sections, and commending the union, he reproduced with grateful variation in many memorable pa.s.sages of later speeches. The original and reproductions are the most precious gems of our literature, ranking in excellence even above Poe's poetry, America's best.

The speech of 1833 against Calhoun's nullification resolutions, that which won for Webster the cognomen, The Expounder of the Const.i.tution, belongs to the next succeeding stage, wherein he rose from supreme panegyric to invincible defence of the union. As we have already given in a former chapter this performance its due praise, we need not say more of it.

This chapter would not be complete if we failed to glance at the essentials of Webster's greatness as an orator, and to point out the means used by the powers to give him his extraordinary excellence. He did not stale himself by discussing trivial matters. When he rose, people knew that he had an important message, and they ought to attend. In harmony with this was his uniform seriousness, gravity, and becoming dignity of manner; and even in his merry-making humor, as instanced in describing Hayne leading the South Carolina militia, he never stooped. He spoke to the sound common sense and the regnant conscience of the ma.s.ses. His propositions, his ill.u.s.trations, his argument went home without effort to every one who thought at all and who cared for moral virtue. The entire country has heard with great acceptance that Davy Crockett said to him, "Mr. Webster, you are not the great orator people say you are; for I heard your speech, and I understood every word of it." Whether this be an invention or not, it well characterizes his easy intelligibility. Herbert Spencer could have exampled the main proposition of his able essay on style by Webster's best efforts, and every part and parcel of them--statement of proposition, necessary explanation and narrative, distinctions, ill.u.s.trations, reasoning, invocation of feeling--appeal to the sense of justice. I often feel that he is not more majestic in any particular than the always manifest meaning of what he says. In this he reminds of Bacon.

He chose only the most important subjects; he befittingly addressed always the higher nature of his hearers; and he always spoke with a transparent clearness. But all this does not indicate more than the mere beginning of true eloquence. The greatest teachers--those who win and keep the admiration of the world--have, as their wors.h.i.+ppers teach us, gifts of expression commensurate with the desert of their communications. Remember Homer, Plato, Demosthenes, Vergil, Cicero, Dante, Bacon, Goethe, and above all Shakspeare. As the reader hangs over them he becomes more and more unconscious of what we call, rather vaguely, their style. Their diction, in unhackneyed use of hackneyed words, in metaphors that flash like electric sparks, in appropriateness of varied rhythm, and all appertaining jewels, becomes to him but a belonging of the much more precious sense. As it must impart that without impediment it is unconsciously made as like it as the protecting coloring of animals is made like that of the objects amidst which they lurk. There has been but one other which admits of comparison in world-wide secular importance with Webster's theme--that which inspired

"Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento."

We have learned how the aeneid was prized above all other poetry, not only by the Romans themselves, but, long after they had become a mere name and memory, by the different nations of Europe. Plainly it was because Vergil, in that "stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man," had fitly celebrated the greatest factor delivering from barbarism, and spreading civilization abroad, that had yet appeared in history,--the Roman empire.

The American union, immeasurably exceeding that empire in immediate good to millions at home, and in fair promise to all the earth, was Webster's subject. It got from him an appropriate style. The variety of ornament in his language reaches all the way from the modest violets of the Anglo-Saxon common to Bunyan and King James's version, up to the most gorgeous trappings which are part and parcel of the sense in the best pa.s.sages of Paradise Lost. There is also a variety of idiom. He uses that of the field or street, or of the gentleman or of the scholar, as best suits. He affected short sentences, and also pure English words. He told Davis to weed the Latin words out of his speech on Adams and Jefferson.

But when occasion calls he can revel in that latinity of our tongue which, as De Quincey has noted, becomes intense with Shakspeare, when he is soaring his strongest. If you are inclined to dispute this, look over the last two sentences of the reply to Hayne. How you would lower this sublime peroration into the dust, if you replaced the Latin with native derivatives, or changed the long for short sentences in what is now above all example in English or American oratory, and can be paralleled in structure, "ocean-roll of rhythm," and exquisite words only by the most famous paragraphs of Cicero and Livy. As our last word here, Webster always imparts the wisest counsel as to the American union in phrase all-golden, and his eloquence is ent.i.tled to praise beyond all other, because it is always what his high subject demands.

As I have to do mainly with the permanent and lasting in Webster, I can merely allude to his physical endowments, described with such rapture by March, Choate, and many others of his time, and well summarized by Mr.

Lodge. I must remind the reader how it accorded with the purpose of the powers to bestow upon their favorite majesty of form, mien, and look, a voice that suggested the music of the spheres, action that would have been a model to Demosthenes; in short, a physique for the orator superior to any on record. These things helped him mightily in his day.

Apparently I finished with Webster's education some pages back of this.

But the more important part of it has not as yet been touched upon; and it is inc.u.mbent upon me to tell it, because of the lesson we ought to learn from it.

The largest and most characterizing part of our education--perhaps it would more accurately express my meaning to say our culture--each one of us gets from his a.s.sociations, from his contact with the people of all sorts around him in his infancy, boyhood, and manhood often as far on as middle age, if not sometimes farther. We get it by imitation, unconscious and conscious, and by absorption from what we see, hear, and read, etc., which absorption is often most active when we are least aware of it. Now let us consider the community of which Webster was the product.

In the Plymouth oration, as we have already suggested, he exhibits the exceptional progress and acquisitions of New England. What other community ever showed greater courage against danger or greater energy against obstacles, and such wise building-up of a new country in a strange land?

The Pilgrim Fathers could not have liberty and their own religion at home, and for these they went into the wilderness. There they kept the savage at bay. With soil and climate both unfavorable they wrought out general plenty and comfort. They prospered in industry. They equalized as far as they could all in property rights. And these liberty-lovers gave the regulation of local affairs to the town meeting, of which Webster says: "Nothing can exceed the utility of these little bodies. They are so many councils or parliaments, in which common interests are discussed, and useful knowledge acquired and communicated."

Jefferson, the great apostle of popular self-government, most earnestly longed to see all America outside of New England divided into such towns.h.i.+ps as hers.

But to return to the Pilgrims. They established schools and churches everywhere. Free education was maintained by taxation of all property.

Let us sum up. Here was a country in which everybody had been well trained in the available ways of self-support and also of saving and acc.u.mulating,--the very first essential to make good citizens. Such citizens were required to administer their public affairs themselves; and thus they received the very best political education and training in a school of genuine democracy,--which is the next essential. The children of each generation were schooled better than those of the former, the colleges and universities constantly did better with the students, and libraries open to the public both multiplied and enlarged,--the third essential. And education and business were rationally mixed, until in Webster's time it might be said with truth that the average New Englander worked with a will, and wisely, every day to maintain himself and family, and also found leisure to add something of value to his store of knowledge. Here is another essential. The moral and religious atmosphere became purer and purer, and more and more on all sides good intention was conspicuous in the light, and evil intention hid itself deep in the dark.

This is the last essential.

The foregoing is made up from the Plymouth oration. Webster was too near to discern all the intellectual and moral advancement and the opulent future promise of his own community, the proper fruit of the conditions just summarized.[79] Let us indicate by only such a paucity of examples as we have room for. Able and fully furnished lawyers everywhere. Think of Story, a most diligently attending judge and one of the best; also finding time both to be the first law professor and most fertile and eminent author of the age, exhausting English and American sources and authority in his books, and crowding them with a civil law learning to be surpa.s.sed only by that of the Roman jurists of Germany; let Ticknor, whom we may call the founder of the post cla.s.sical school of literature in our country, suggest the students of modern languages who followed in an ill.u.s.trious line,--let him suggest also the famous historians, such as Prescott, Bancroft, Hildreth, Motley, Parkman, really representatives of the school just mentioned, using methods that got into the American air first from Ticknor; let Channing suggest the pulpit,--Channing, who raised religion from the gloom of dogma and orthodoxy into a life of angelic joy; what can one say to describe Emerson in a breath,--the teacher to us all of fit aspiration, right thinking, n.o.ble expression, the highest virtue and truest religion, and who lived, as Dr. Heber Newton has lately told, the most perfect of lives as a man; Hawthorne, showing the world sick with its yearning for moral redemption that even a disgraced, lone, and friendless woman can by a subsequent life of unreserved confession, purity, and love to her neighbors turn a horrible brand of guilt into a jewel more precious and brilliant than diamond,--how his consummate achievement rebukes the sixty years' dilatoriness of Goethe over his unfinished Faust; and divine poets, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes,--the last two conspicuous in letters, Lowell being in my judgment the greatest American man of letters; I have said nothing of the statesmen and orators, beginning with Fisher Ames and John Adams,--and there are others in every high round of the intellectual life known all over the land whose names I must omit.