The sentiment of Webster, calmly meditating on the heights of Quebec, contrasts strangely with the fiery feeling of Faust, raging against the limitations of his mortal existence.  A humorist, Charles Dickens, who never read either Goethe or Webster, has oddly seized on the same general idea:  “The British empire,” as he says, in one of his novels,—­“on which the sun never sets, and where the tax-gatherer never goes to bed.”

This celebrated image of the British “drum-beat” is here cited simply to indicate the natural way in which all the faculties of Webster are brought into harmonious co-operation, whenever he seriously discusses any great question.  His understanding and imagination, when both are roused into action, always cordially join hands.  His statement of facts is so combined with the argument founded on them, that they are interchangeable; his statement having the force of argument, and his argument having the “substantiality” which properly belongs to statement; and to these he commonly adds an imaginative illustration, which gives increased reality to both statement and argument.  In rapidly turning over the leaves of the six volumes of his Works, one can easily find numerous instances of this instinctive operation of his mind.  In his first Bunker Hill oration, he announces that “the principle of free governments adheres to the American soil.  It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains.”  Again he says:  “A call for the representative system, wherever it is not enjoyed, and where there is already intelligence enough to estimate its value, is perseveringly made.  Where men may speak out, they demand it where the bayonet is at their throats, they pray for it.”  And yet again:  “If the true spark of religious and civil liberty be kindled, it will burn.  Human agency cannot extinguish it.  Like the earth’s central fire, it may be smothered for a time; the ocean may overwhelm it; mountains may press it down; but its inherent and unconquerable force will heave both the ocean and the land, and at some time or other, in some place or other, the volcano will break out, and flame up to heaven.”  It would be difficult to find in any European literature a similar embodiment of an elemental sentiment of humanity, in an image which is as elemental as the sentiment to which it gives vivid expression.

And then with what majesty, with what energy, and with what simplicity, can he denounce a political transaction which, had it not attracted his ire, would hardly have survived in the memory of his countrymen!  Thus, in his Protest against Mr. Benton’s Expunging Resolution, speaking for himself and his Senatorial colleague, he says:  “We rescue our own names, character, and honor from all participation in this matter; and, whatever the wayward character of the times, the headlong and plunging spirit of party devotion, or the fear or the love of power, may have been able to bring about elsewhere, we desire to thank God that