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him as faithful and affectionate friends. It was a solenin and religious parting, in which, while all around ʼn were overwhelmed with sorrow, he preserved his accustomed equanim ity, speaking to each words of appropriate kindness and consolation which they will treasure hereafter among their most precious and life-long possessions."

Having performed all these duties to the living, and having without any doubt settled and fixed his relations satisfactorily with God, he now seemed to enter into the work of death, if these words can express the thought, as no other man has done of whom history gives any clear account. Socrates, when dying, conversed with his friends about immortality and the future life. Triumphant christians usually die with exclamations of joy over their consciousness of deliverance from an evil world and their immediate entrance into a felicity ineffable and eternal. Mr. Webster, as original in death as he had always been in life, after having closed up the past and provided for the future, appeared now to give himself exclusively to the experience of the present. He seemed to watch, with all his great powers of mind, each passing moment, and note each remove he made toward the final goal. A celebrated philosopher once held himself immersed in water, that he might learn the first sensations of a drowning man; and another, equally celebrated and equally curious, stood in a receiver while the air was gradually taken from it by an air-pump, because, for some philosophical reason, he wished to know the experience of one dying, or rather beginning to die, by a want of breath. These persons, however, expected not to die, but to be rescued at the proper time. They could, therefore, go coolly to their experiments. Here is a man, on the contrary, who desired to learn all the feelings of a person, not in a few of the first moments of a stoppage of vitality, but in the very act of dying, and through the whole gloomy process and progress of that act to the very last. He is making no experiment, no feint, soon

to be relinquished. Nor, like the classic poets, who, in imagi nation, had described the passage of the soul to the other world, was he throwing himself into any unreal state of fancy. All was real, actual, solemn fact. He was actually dying; and, as no one but a dying man can know how one dies, and as his first and last opportunity of obtaining this knowledge was then with him, he resolved to embrace that opportunity to the utmost. This remarkable resolution could have been taken with no view of communicating the results of it to his fellow-crea tures. All he could expect from what he might thus learn of the soul's leave-taking of the body was, that the mind would carry its knowledge with it into the world he was about to enter. Of the millions of the human family who had died, perhaps no one had ever carried any perfect recognition of this final act into the future state; and it is possible that Mr. Webster may have conceived the original and sublime thought of being the bearer of this new knowledge into that pure, intellectual world of which he was so soon to become an inhabitant. It is more probable, however, even if such a conception may have flashed upon his mind, that the great motive of the act was simply his original, irrepressible, undecaying, and undying thirst for knowledge. It was his love of truth; and, cer tainly, as no man had ever given greater evidences of the strength of this ruling propensity in life, so no man ever gave to it so glorious an exhibition in the hour and article of death. "From the morning of Saturday," says Mr. Ticknor, "when he had announced to his attendant physician-what nobody, until that time, had intimated-that 'he should die that night,' the whole strength of his great faculties seemed to be directed. to obtain for him a plain and clear perception of his onward passage to another world, and of his feelings and condition at the precise moment, when he should be entering its confines. Once, being faint, he asked if he were not then dying; and, on being answered that he was not, but that he was near to death,

he replied simply, well,' as if the frank and exact reply were what he desired to receive. A little later, when his kind physician repeated to him that striking text of Scripture-'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me,' he seemed less satisfied, and said, 'Yes-but the fact-the fact I want,' desiring to know if he were to regard these words as an intimation that he was already within that dark valley. On another occasion, he inquired whether it were likely that he should again eject blood from his stomach before death, and, being told that it was improbable, he asked, 'Then what shall you do?' Being answered that he would be supported by stimulants, and rendered as easy as possible by the opiates that had suited him so well, he inquired at once if the stimulants should not be given immediately, anxious again to know if the hand of death were not already upon him. And, on being told that it would not be then given, he replied, 'When you give it to me, I shall know that I may drop off at once.' Being satisfied on this point, and that he should, therefore, have a final warning, he said, a moment afterwards, ‘I will, then, put myself in a position to obtain a little repose.' In this he was successful. He had intervals of rest to the last; but on rousing from them, he showed that he was still intensely anxious to preserve his consciousness, and to watch for the moment and act of his departure, so as to comprehend it. Awaking from one of these slumbers, late in the night, he asked distinctly if he were alive, and, on being assured that he was, and that his family was collected around his bed, he said, in a perfectly natural tone, as if assenting to what had been told him, because he himself perceived that it was true, 'I still live.' These were his last coherent and intelligible words. At twenty-three minutes before three o'clock, without a struggle or a groan, ali signs of life ceased to be visible, his vital organs giving way at last so slowly and gradually as to indicate—

what everything during his illness had already shown-that his intellectual and moral faculties still maintained an extraor dinary mastery amidst the failing resources of his physica constitution."

Reader, thus lived and thus passed away from earth a man, who, for all time to come, is to hold his rank, not with those of his countrymen with whom he happened to be associated in life, but with the most illustrious men that have had an existence in the world. Centuries from this day, when not only the few that misunderstood but the many who appreciated and loved him shall be forgotten, his name is to stand in the list where such names as Moses and Lycurgus, Solon and Cicero, Burke and Bacon, Wilberforce and Washington, are recorded. Ages from this date, when the youth of this republic, if, happily, the republic he twice saved shall, find other saviors to preserve it, shall read the history of the first century of their country, next to that of George Washington, no name will be so well known, or hold so high a place, as the name of Daniel Webster. Ages and centuries hence, when future senates, again vexed by internal discords, shall seek to know how to maintain with national integrity the integrity of the nation, they will at once recur, as to a store-house of political wisdom, to the still surviving works of the first and ablest of this century's statesmen; and, in that far-off period, and through every suc ceeding period of our existence as a country, the students of a thousand liberal institutions, devoted to science, the arts, and the professions, will be as familiar with his master-pieces as the students of this generation are with those of the Greek, Roman, and British orators. Nay, more, as republics, like other governments, have their life and their decay, so when the union of these states shall have come to its natural dissolution when

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its history shall have receded so far back as to be reckoned with the present antiquities of the earth, then the Americans who shall stand upon this soil, as the modern Greeks now stand upon the soil of their great ancestors, shall look backward upon the few names which history or tradition shall have saved from the general wreck; and then, whatever names shall have gone to oblivion, never to be recovered, never to be recalled, never to be pronounced again, of whom there will be many now known to fame, among the few that do not die, and as immortal as any of the number, will the name of Daniel Webster stand, still recorded, still read, still revered, becoming more memorable and more imperishable with the lapse of time: "All of Agricola that gained our love, and raised our admiration, still subsists, and will ever subsist, preserved in the minds of men, the register of ages, and the lists of fame!"

Such having been the life of Daniel Webster, and such being the position he holds and is to hold in coming time, it is not expedient to close this record without looking back upon him, without casting some reflections on the singular character and import of his life, and without drawing such instructions from it as it is so capable of furnishing, and will not fail to furnish, to the more penetrating and thoughtful of mankind.

In entering upon such a review, it will be at once evident, that a single quality of mind, or a single trait of character, if developed largely and made very prominent, is generally suf ficient to give to ordinary great men a title to their reputation, but that many qualities, and many traits, with every attribute of his being, ir. fact, have to be examined and accounted for, in ma king up the character of such an extraordinary man as Daniel Webster.

It will be remembered that Dr. Franklin, as the representa tive of his class of men, was considered great, and received great applause from his cotemporaries, for having the energy and the genius to overcome and rise above the obscurity and poverty 30

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