within the charmed circle of his intimacy. He was, as we have said, a country boy in early life; and it is eminently true, and especially worthy of remark, that the associations of the country were always uppermost in his bosom, when happily liberated from affairs of government and the state. He was always happy, if we may take the concurrent testimony of his oldest friends and of himself, when he could escape from the worrying cares and anxieties of professional or of public life, to the retired and homely pursuits of his Marshfield farm. The most genial humor pervaded all he did and said, while thus engaged. "He loved," (says a forceful but evidently a very warped writer,* who, from some difference of opinion upon a much-agitated subject, regarded him with no partial eye,)" he loved out-door and manly sports-boating, fishing, fowling. He was fond of nature, loving New Hampshire's mountain scenery. He had started small and poor, had risen great and high, and honorably had fought his way alone. He was a farmer, and took a

MR. WEBSTER AT MARSHFIELD.

countryman's delight in country things; in loads of hay, in trees; and the noble Indian corn-in monstrous swine. He had a patriarch's love of sheep-choice breeds thereof he had. He took delight in cows-short-horned Durhams, Herefordshires, Ayrshires, Alderneys. He tilled paternal acres with his own oxen. He loved to give * Mr. Parker does not hesitate to insinuate, or to declare, that Mr. Webster "had his price," in some instances, for the part which he took on certain public questions. He may have had; but as Lord Camden said of Fox, "his price was immortality, and he knew that Posterity would pay it"-and in Mr. Webster's case most assuredly it

will.

the kine fodder. It was pleasant to hear his talk of oxen. And but three days before he left the earth, too ill to visit them, his oxen, lowing, came to see their sick lord, and as he stood in his door, his great cattle were driven up, that he might smell their healthy breath, and look his last on those broad, generous faces, that were never false to him. He was a friendly man: all along the shore there were plain men that loved him-whom he also loved; a good neighbor, a good townsman

"Lofty and sour to those that loved him not, But to those men that sought him, sweet as summer,'" And with all his greatness, we must be permitted to regard him in the light that we love best to regard the departed statesman. We love to read the simple, cordial, honest letters, that he addressed to his farmer-overseer at Franklin, and those to old friends, in which he described the struggles of his early life in the country; in which humor sometimes vies with pathos, until you both laugh and weep at the felicity of the

combination. What, for example, could be more simple, more manly, more touching, than the following extract? The words of the closing paragraph seem to have sobbed as they dropped from the pen:

"My Father, Ebenezer Webster!--born at Kingston, in the lower part of the State, in 1739-the handsomest man I ever saw, except my brother EZEKIEL, who appeared to me, and so does he now seem to me, the very finest human form that ever I laid eyes on. I saw him in his coffin--a white forehead-a tinged cheek-a complexion as clear as heavenly light! But where am I straying?

"The grave has closed upon him, as it has on all my brothers and sisters. We shall soon be all together. But this is melancholy-and I leave it. Dear, dear kindred blood, how I love you all!

"This fair field is before me--I could see a lamb on any part of it. I have plowed it, and raked it, and hoed it, but I never mowed it. Somehow, I could never learn to hang a scythe! I had not wit enough. My brother Joe used to say that my father sent me to college in order to make me equal to the rest of the children! Of a hot day in July-it must have been one of the last years of Washington's administration -I was making hay, with my father, just where I now see a remaining elm tree, about the middle of the afternoon. The Hon. ABIEL FOSTER, M. C., who lived in Canterbury, six miles off, called at the house, and came into the field to see my father. He was a worthy man, college-learned, and had been a minister, but was not a person of any considerable natural powers. My father was his friend and supporter. He talked a while in the field, and went on his way. When he was gone, my father called me to him, and we sat down beneath the elm, on a hay-cock. He said, 'My son, that is a worthy man; he is a memsix dollars a day, while I toil here. It is because he ber of Congress; he goes to Philadelphia, and gets had an education, which I never had. If I had had his early education, I should have been in Philadelphia in his place. I came near it, as it was; but 1 missed it, and now I must work here.' My dear father,' said I, 'you shall not work; brother and 1 will work for you, and wear our hands out, and you shall rest'-and I remember to have cried, and I cry

now at the recollection. My child,' said he, it is of no importance to me; I now live but for my children; I could not give your elder brother the advantages of knowledge, but I can do something for you. Exert yourself-improve your opportunities-learn -learn-and when I am gone, you will not need to go through the hardships which I have undergone, and which have made me an old man before my time.' The next May he took me to Exeter, to the Philips Exeter Academy-placed me under the tuition of its excellent preceptor, Dr. BENJAMIN ABBOTT, still living."

The limits of this article forbid the insertion of farther extracts; but the letters already published in the newspapers will have afforded the reader some idea of the variety and richness of Mr. Webster's epistolary correspondence.

We pass to an illustration or two of Mr. Webster's oratorical manner, and a few anecdotes of Mr. Webster, connected with his private life and public performances. No one who has ever seen Mr. Webster, will need any aid to memory in recalling his personal appearance, his preeminently marked features: the commanding height, the large head and ample forehead; the large, black, solemn, cavernous eyes, under the pent-house of the overhanging brows; the firm, compressed lips, and broad chest--all these 'can never be forgotten.

We heard Mr. Webster, for the first time, on the platform of the new Exchange in Wall-street, which was crowded with people; but his voice, in tones rather harsh, we thought, than musical, could be heard to the extremest limit of the vast crowd; and well do we remember his hesitation in the choice of a word, which he seemed determined to have, and which he did have at last, and used with a most happy effect. "We want," said he, speaking of the necessity for a national bank, "an institution that shall-an institution that has an odor of nationality about it;" and the applause that followed, attested the force and felicitousness of the figure.

A friend recently mentioned to the writer another instance which happily illustrates this peculiarity of Mr. Webster, when speaking extemporaneously. He seldom would make use of a word or words which did not altogether satisfy him; when that did happen, he would strike from his remarks, by a short pause, the word he had first used, and substitute another. If that did not altogether please him, he would employ still another, and so on, until he had obtained just the word he wanted, and that would be uttered with such emphasis as he alone could give to language.

A year or two ago," continued the gentleman to whom we have alluded, "I heard him speak in the Supreme Court at Washington, on the great Wheeling Bridge case. In the course of his argument, he alluded to a large sum of money involved in that case, which had been shut up for many years in the vaults of the Bank of Georgia:

ever heard Mr. Webster speak emphatically, will not be surprised when I say that the word 'DISGORGE,' as uttered by him on the occasion I have mentioned, weighed about twelve pounds!"

Many readers of this sketch will perhaps remember hearing Mr. Webster in this city, in that celebrated public dinner-speech of his, wherein he paid that magnificent tribute to the genius and character of ALEXANDER HAMILTON, There is a circumstance connected with one of the finest passages in this speech, which, in the opinion of the writer, deserves to be recorded. "You could have heard"-remarks a distinguished friend and correspondent of the writer hereof, who had the pleasure of sitting very near Mr. Webster on the occasion alluded to—“ you could have heard the falling of a pin any where in the crowded assemblage, while Mr. Webster was speaking. When he came to advert to Hamilton's influence in creating and establishing a system of public credit, at a time when it was so much needed, he illustrated his subject with that memorable figure: 'He smote the rock of the national resources, and abundant streams of revenue gushed forth and as Mr. Webster said this, he brought his right hand down upon the table, to enforce the simile; and in so doing, he happened to hit a wine-glass, which broke, and slightly cut his hand and as the blood oozed from the wound, he slowly wrapped a white napkin around it, and then finished the figure: 'He touched the dead corpse of the Public Credit, and it rose upon its feet!"

It is the belief of our informant that the last simile " sprung from the occasion," and was suggested by the white napkin and the oozing blood. Be this as it may, for mingled force and appositeness, the figure has rarely if ever been excelled, even by the great orator who used it.

Undoubtedly Mr. Webster's personal presence was one great element of his matchless oratory.* "When he rose and came down to the edge of the platform, with a small roll of manuscript in his hand, at the celebration of the completion of the Bunker-Hill Monument," said a distinguished jurist of this city," and cast a glance at the sea of two hundred thousand faces turned up

* Of the recent portraits of Mr. Webster, the most life-like and truthful that we have seen, is one engraved from a daguerreotype, taken not long since in Boston. Mr. C. L ELLIOTT, our distinguished artist, visited Marshfield late in August, to execute a full-length picture of Mr. Webster, for which he had a most liberal commission from a gentleman of wealth in this city. But the arrival of the British Minister at Marshfield, ill health.

and the troubles of "the Fishery" question, caused a postponement of the sittings to October. But October was too late and a perfect counterpart of the great statesman was thus lost to his country and to the world. The profile sketch of Mr. Webster, above given, is from a daguerreotype taken from life a short time before his death, for his friend and private secretary, CHARLES LANMAN, Esq. The full-length sketch delineated in the en

graving on the next page, was taken in June last. at the

request of Mr. Lauman. Mr. Webster sat carelessly under a tree at Marshfield, which he planted with his own The portrait at the head of this hands thirty years ago article is also from a daguerreotype from life, taken within a few weeks of his death, also in possession of Mr Lanman.