What justice can be done "in an half-hour of words, to fifty years of
great deeds on high places." The most meagre epitome of Daniel Webster's
career, can not be compressed into the few pages allotted him in this
book. Foremost, in the highest spheres of intellectual exertion, as a
lawyer, orator and statesman--great in all these, yet greater as a
man--how can his character, even in outline, be sketched by an unskilled
pencil, on so small a canvas? High as were his stations, and severe as
were his labors, they were not high nor severe enough, to exhaust his
force, or exhibit his full proportions, but while meeting and mastering
all, it was still manifest, that he had powers in reserve, superior to
greater tasks than were ever imposed. At the bar, the puzzles of
jurisprudence yielded too readily to his analysis. In Congress, but one
question only ever wrung his withers or strained his strength. He shook
off the perplexities of diplomacy, like dew-drops from his mane; too
great for party, too great for sycophancy, too great to be truly
appreciated, the exalted position to which he aspired, would have added
no new lustre to his name, no additional guarantee of its immortality.
There was no niche in our temple, vast enough for his colossal image.
Consider too, the extent and profundity of his opinions, during the
half-century of his public life. On all questions of our foreign and
domestic policy, on all the important epochs of our history, on
everything respecting the origin, growth, commerce, peace and prosperity
of this union of states, "everywhere the philosophical and patriotic
statesman and thinker, will find that he has been before him, lighting
the way, sounding the abyss. His weighty language, his sagacious
warnings, his great maxims of empire, will be raised to view and live to
be deciphered, when the final catastrophe shall lift the granite
foundation in fragments from its bed." Merely to review the record of
these opinions, his public speeches, historical discourses, and state
papers would be to write the civil and constitutional history of the
country since the war of 1812.
Assaying none of these ambitious flights, and bearing in mind the title
of this book, we shall confine ourselves to the humble task of collating
from the fragmentary reminiscences of personal friends, and from his own
autobiographical allusions, a brief account of the homes and home life
of Webster.[21]
There is a "vulgar error," which needs no Sir Thomas Browne to refute,
that the possession of great intellectual endowments, is incompatible
with the growth and development of the affections. During his entire
career Mr. Webster suffered from this misconception. When he refused to
adopt any of the arts of popular adulation; when he manifested his real
respect for the people, by addressing their understandings, rather than
by cajoling their weaknesses; when, rapt in his own meditations, he
forgot to bow, to smile, to flatter, and bandy unmeaning compliment;
when the mean stood abashed before his nobleness, and the weak before
his strength, disappointed self-conceit, invariably turned from his
presence, with the sneering remark, "Webster has no soul."
Death strips off all disguises. Calumny is silent over the graves of the
great. It was not, until he was removed beyond the reach of party
warfare and interested depreciation, it was not, until the veil that hid
his true lineaments, was drawn aside, that Mr. Webster's inner life, and
social relations, were revealed to his countrymen, and they began to
discover, that underneath the giant's brain, there was a giant heart.
The disclosures of those who enjoyed his familiarity and confidence,
have now placed it beyond all controversy, that home, home affections,
home pursuits, home enjoyments, were more congenial to Mr. Webster's
nature, than the dizzy heights of office, or the stormy forum.
He saw not merely in HOME, the walls that protected him, from Boreas and
the dog-star, the spot of earth appropriated to himself, the place that
ministered to his material enjoyments, but while the sense of comfort
and the sense of property entered into its complex idea, his sentiments
and affections gave to it a higher and holier meaning. The word HOME
carried him back to his infancy, and forward to his age. It connected
itself with all his affections, filial, fraternal, parental, with those
grand and solemn epochs of humanity, birth, marriage and death. To his
lofty imagination, the roof-tree was consecrated with ceremonies, more
imposing than those of our Saxon ancestors. It symbolized the family
tie, the domestic virtues, the Lares and Penates of classic mythology.
Home was his retreat from the world of action, to the world of
contemplation. Here he was to _live_. These walls would witness those
experiences, sweet, bitter, mournful; those communings with God, with
friends, kindred and himself; those aspirations, dreams,
disappointments--that are embraced in that word of infinite
significance, _Life_. Here his wife was to administer love and
consolation; here children were to be born, hostages to fortune,
heritors of name and fame, idols upon whom can be lavished the
inexhaustible treasures of love. Here the pilgrimage was to end, here he
was to die.
On the bleak and rugged soil of Salisbury, New Hampshire, in a green
nook, hardly sheltered from the wintry blasts, he was born. Under an
aged elm, whose branches reach across the highway, stands this ancient
habitation. It is in the shadow of lofty mountains, while a broad and
rapid river winds through the meadows spread out before the door.
"Looking out at the east window," says he, in one of his letters, from
this hallowed spot, "my eye sweeps along a level field of one hundred
acres. At the end of it, a third of a mile off, I see plain marble
grave-stones, designating the places where repose my father and mother,
brother and sisters. The fair field is before me. I could see a lamb on
any part of it. I have ploughed it, and raked it, but never mowed it;
somehow, I could never learn to hang a scythe."
As Webster advances, in years and distinction, he seems only to have
been drawing a lengthened chain from his first home. With what constancy
does he carry its features in his mind, Kearsarge, the Merrimack and
Punch Brook! He spares no expense to cultivate the old acres and keep,
the old house in repair. With what regularity does he revisit it and
explore all his boyish haunts, the orchard, the mill, the meeting-house,
the well, the hillside and the trout stream! With what a swelling
heart, and moistened eye, does he sit beneath the ancestral elms that
stretch their arms, in benediction, over the old homestead, while busy
fancy repeoples these familiar scenes with the absent and the dead, the
mother that bore him, the father on whose shoulder he wept, the much
beloved brother, whose education he earned, "with weary fingers by the
midnight lamp?" How from the great popular gathering, from the "sea of
upturned faces," and even from the important issues that hung on his
eloquence, does his mind impulsively wander to this cherished
home--"Raised amid the snow-drifts of New Hampshire, at a period so
early that, when the smoke first rose from its rude chimney, and curled
over the frozen hills, there was no similar evidence of a white man's
habitation between it and the settlements on the rivers of Canada. Its
remains still exist. I make to it an annual visit. I carry my children
to it to teach them the hardships endured by the generations which have
gone before them. I love to dwell on the tender recollections, the
kindred ties, the early affections, and the touching narratives and
incidents, which mingle with all I know of this primitive family abode.
I weep to think that none of those who inhabited it are now among the
living; and if ever I am ashamed of it, or if I ever fail in
affectionate veneration for HIM who reared and defended it against
savage violence and destruction, cherished all the domestic virtues
beneath its roof, and, through the fire and blood of seven years'
revolutionary war, shrunk from no danger, no toil, no sacrifice to serve
his country, and to raise his children to a condition better than his
own, may my name and the name of my posterity be blotted forever from
the memory of mankind."
"Take care," says he, in one of the last letters which he wrote to John
Taylor, "take care to keep my mother's garden in good order, even if it
cost you the wages of a man to take care of it." One of Mr. Webster's
most cherished relics, which he sometimes carried in his vest pocket,
and exhibited to his friends, was an antique tea-spoon, covered with
rust, which John Taylor found in this very garden of his mother. In the
library at Marshfield, the eye turns from Healey's splendid portraits,
to a small and unpretending silhouette, with the inscription, "my
excellent mother," in the handwriting of her immortal son.
When he selected as the home of his manhood, the old mansion by the
far-resounding sea, how completely was every want of his nature
represented in the grand and impressive features of the place.
MARSHFIELD lies within the limits of the Pilgrims' earliest colony, and
on Mr. Webster's farm stands the house to which Edward Winslow carried
his household gods, from aboard the tempest-tost Mayflower, and the
house to which a company of British soldiers bade final adieu, when they
marched from it to storm the redoubts on Bunker Hill. It thus connects
two chapters of that colonial history, which Mr. Webster loved to study
and paint, and two imperishable monuments to his own renown. It is
surrounded by vast and fertile fields, meadows and pastures green,
dotted here and there with groves and orchards, for one who worshiped,
as in a sanctuary, beneath the over-hanging branches of trees, and
dotted also with great herds of red and black oxen, for one who "was
glad when his cattle lifted up their large-eyed, contemplative faces,
and recognized their master by a look." Its border, landward, is hedged
with nothing less than a vast forest of pines, and within a few hours'
ride, lies a fresh wilderness, unbroken, as when the Pilgrims first saw
it from the Mayflower's mast-head, where the wild eagle still soars, and
the timid deer "glances through the glade." His eye, far as its glance
could penetrate, rested on the most sublime of all nature's attractions,
on thee--
"glorious mirror where the Almighty's form
Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,
Calm or convulsed--in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid zone
Dark heaving; boundless, endless, and sublime,
The image of eternity, the throne
Of the Invisible."
Scattered over its far-reaching expanse, he could always see the white
sails of that commerce he loved to defend, and occasionally, one of
those "oak leviathans," bearing the glorious flag of the union--"not a
stripe erased, or polluted, not a single star obscured;" memorials at
once of the nation's glory, and of his own proudest triumph.
As deep answereth unto deep, none of the majestic harmonies of the
domain, but found a full and equal response in the bosom of its lord.
Old ocean never rolled its waves, at the feet of one who could better
grasp their immeasurable extent, unfathomable depth. When, with these
surroundings, he stood on that autumn eve, beneath that magnificent elm
that grows by his door-side, the sea's eternal anthem in his ear, and in
his eye, the infinite vault of the starry heavens, he could find in
recorded language but this one utterance: "When I consider thy heavens,
the work of thy fingers; the moon and the stars, which thou hast
ordained; what is man that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man,
that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the
angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor."
While his tastes were thus attuned to the grandest aspects of nature,
all the rural sights and rural sounds of this chosen spot, ministered to
the delight of his acute sensibilities. "The smell of new-mown hay,"
says Mr. Hillard, "and of the freshly turned furrows of spring, was
cordial to his spirit. The whetting of the mower's scythe, the beat of
the thresher's flail, the heavy groan of loaded wagons, were music to
his ear!" The rich verdure of clover, the waving of the golden grain,
the shriek of the sea-mew and the softest song of the nightingale;
all the varying aspects of sky and field and sea, furnished him with a
distinct and peculiar enjoyment. The shrinking quail whistled in his
garden shrubbery, and fed, unscared, in his carriage-way.
The observer can not fail to notice characteristics of Webster in all
the features of this favorite abode. His door-yard is a broad field of
twenty acres, unbroken by fence or hedge. Around it, sweep in concentric
circles, of vast diameter, great belts of forest-trees, planted with his
own hands, offering secluded recesses and shady walks, where "musing
solitude might love to roam." Gotham Hill, once a sand-bank, piled up by
the ocean, and long defeating, by its barrenness, the ingenuity of his
culture, he at length clothed with a green garment of beautiful clover.
Cherry Hill was converted from a lean and parched mole, into a cool and
inviting grove, within a rod of his door, almost an alcove to the
library. Everything in and about the house were as thoroughly systemized
and adapted to each other, as the points of one of his briefs. The
appurtenances of the mansion, the main barn, the sheep barn, the
piggery, are all where the necessities of the farm and the comeliness of
the homestead require them to be placed. In the interior, the parlors,
the library filled with the lore of all ages, the ample hospitality of
the dining-room, the breakfast-room, opening toward that morning light
he loved so dearly, the dairy cooled by its proximity to the ice-house,
the gun-room furnished with every appliance for field sports, the
decorations and the furniture; everything in his mansion as in his
arguments, bespeaks the mind of Webster.
Within a stone's throw of this parlor-window, observe those two young
English elms; they are called "the Brother and Sister," and were thus
named and thus planted, by the bereaved father, when Julia and Edward
were torn from his heart. "I hope the _trees_ will live," said he, with
touching pathos of tone, as he completed this labor of love. There is no
more pathetic expression of parental sorrow, to be found in our
language, than the dedication of the sixth volume of his works, to the
same departed twain. "With the warmest parental affection, mingled with
afflicted feelings, I dedicate this, the last volume of my works, to the
memory of my deceased children, Julia Webster Appleton, beloved in all
the relations of daughter, wife, mother, sister and friend; and Major
Edward Webster, who died in Mexico, in the military service of the
United States, with unblemished honor and reputation, and who entered
the service solely from a desire to be useful to his country, and do
honor to the state in which he was born.
"Go, gentle spirits, to your destined rest;
While I--reversed our nature's kindlier doom--
Pour forth a father's sorrow on your tomb."