A Suse scal DISCOURSE DELIVERED BEFORE THE FACULTY, STUDENTS, AND ALUMNI OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE, ON THE DAY PRECEDING COMMENCEMENT, JULY 27, 1853, COMMEMORATIVE OF DANIEL WEBSTER. BY RUFUS CHOATE. PUBLISHED BY REQUEST. BOSTON AND CAMBRIDGE: JAMES MUNROE AND COMPANY. 1853. 7392.30 1858, March 31. Sam's A. Green, M.D. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1853, by JAMES MUNROE AND COMPANY, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. CAMBRIDGE: DISCOURSE. It would be a strange neglect of a beautiful and approved custom of the schools of learning, and of one of the most pious and appropriate of the offices of literature, if the college in which the intellectual life of Daniel Webster began, and to which his name imparts charm and illustration, should give no formal expression to her grief in the common sorrow; if she should not draw near, of the most sad, in the procession of the bereaved, to the tomb at the sea, nor find, in all her classic shades, one affectionate and grateful leaf to set in the garland with which they have bound the brow of her child, the mightiest departed. departed. Others mourn and praise him by his more distant and more general titles to fame and remembrance; his supremacy of intellect, his statesmanship of so many years, his eloquence of reason and of the heart, his love of country incorruptible, conscientious, and ruling every hour and act; that greatness combined of genius, of character, of manner, of place, of achievement, which was just now among us, and is not, and yet lives still and evermore. You come, his cherishing mother, to own a closer tie, to indulge an emotion more personal and more fond, — grief and exultation contending for mastery, as in the bosom of the desolated parent, whose tears could not hinder him from exclaiming, "I would not exchange my dead son for any living one of Christendom." Many places in our American world have spoken his eulogy. To all places the service was befitting, for "his renown, is it not of the treasures of the whole country?" To some it belonged, with a strong local propriety, to discharge it. In the halls of Congress, where the majestic form seems ever to stand and the deep tones to linger, the decorated scene of his larger labors and most diffusive glory; in the courts of law, to whose gladsome light he loved to return, — putting on again the robes of that profession ancient as magistracy, noble as virtue, necessary as justice, in which he found the beginning of his honors; in Faneuil Hall, whose air breathes and burns of him; in the commercial cities, to whose pursuits his diplomacy secured a peaceful sea; in the cities of the inland, around whom his capacious public affections, and wise discernment, aimed ever to develop the uncounted resources of that other, and that larger, and that newer America; in the pulpit, whose place among the higher influences which exalt a state, our guide in life, our consolation in death, he appreciated profoundly, and vindicated by weightiest argument and testimony, of whose offices, it is among the fittest, to mark and point the moral of the great things of the world, the excellency of dignity, and the excellency of power passing away as the pride of the wave, — passing from our eye to take on immortality; in these places, and such as these, there seemed a reason beyond, and other, than the universal calamity, for such honors of the grave. But if so, how fit a place is this for such a service! We are among the scenes where the youth of Webster awoke first, and fully, to the life of the mind. We stand, as it were, at the sources, physical, social, moral, intellectual, of that exceeding greatness. Some now here saw that youth; almost it was yours, Nilum parvum videre. Some, one of his instructors certainly, some possibly of his class mates, or nearest college friends, some of the books he read, some of the apartments in which he studied, are here. We can almost call up from their habitation in the past, or in the fancy, the whole spiritual circle which environed that time of his life; the opinions he had embraced; the theories of mind, of religion, of morals, of philosophy, to which he had surrendered himself; the canons of taste and criticism which he had accepted; the great authors whom he loved best; the trophies which began to disturb his sleep; the facts of history which he had learned, believed, and begun to interpret; the shapes of hope and fear in which imagination began to bring before him the good and evil of the future. Still the same outward world is around you, and above you. The sweet and solemn flow of the river gleaming through intervale here and there; margins and samples of the same old woods, but thinned and retiring; the same range of green hills yonder, tolerant of culture to the top, but shaded then by primeval forests, on whose crest the last rays of sunset lingered; 1* |
