on the imagination an image of British power which no statistics could have conveyed to the understanding,—­“a Power,” he said, “which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drum-beat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England.”  Perhaps a mere rhetorician might consider superfluous the word “whole,” as applied to “globe,” and “unbroken,” as following “continuous”; yet they really add to the force and majesty of the expression.  It is curious that, in Great Britain, this magnificent impersonation of the power of England is so little known.  It is certain that it is unrivalled in British patriotic oratory.  Not Chatham, not even Burke, ever approached it in the noblest passages in which they celebrated the greatness and glory of their country.  Webster, it is to be noted, introduced it in his speech, not for the purpose of exalting England, but of exalting our Revolutionary forefathers, whose victory, after a seven years’ war of terrible severity, waged in vindication of a principle, was made all the more glorious from having been won over an adversary so formidable and so vast.

It is reported that, at the conclusion of this speech on the President’s Protest, John Sergeant, of Philadelphia, came up to the orator, and, after cordially shaking hands with him, eagerly asked, “Where, Webster, did you get that idea of the morning drum-beat?” Like other public men, accustomed to address legislative assemblies, he was naturally desirous of knowing the place, if place there was, where such images and illustrations were to be found.  The truth was that, if Webster had ever read Goethe’s Faust,—­which he of course never had done,—­he might have referred his old friend to that passage where Faust, gazing at the setting sun, aches to follow it in its course for ever.  “See,” he exclaims, “how the green-girt cottages shimmer in the setting sun.  He bends and sinks,—­the day is outlived.  Yonder he hurries off, and quickens other life.  Oh, that I have no wing to lift me from the ground, to struggle after—­for ever after—­him!  I should see, in everlasting evening beams, the stilly world at my feet, every height on fire, every vale in repose, the silver brook flowing into golden streams.  The rugged mountain, with all its dark defiles, would not then break my godlike course.  Already the sea, with its heated bays, opens on my enraptured sight.  Yet the god seems at last to sink away.  But the new impulse wakes.  I hurry on to drink his everlasting light,—­the day before me and the night behind,—­and under me the waves.”  In Faust, the wings of the mind follow the setting sun; in Webster, they follow the rising sun; but the thought of each circumnavigates the globe, in joyous companionship with the same centre of life, light, and heat,—­though the suggestion which prompts the sublime idea is widely different.