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discussing the claim made by Senator Calhoun of South Carolina that a state could nullify a national law,
Webster said:--
"To begin with nullification, with the avowed intent, nevertheless, not to proceed to secession,
dismemberment, and general revolution, is as if one were to take the plunge of Niagara, and cry out that he
would stop half way down."
To show the moral bravery of our forefathers and the comparative greatness of England, at that time, he
said:--
"On this question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they raised their flag against a power, to
which, for purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to be
compared; a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military
posts, whose morning drumbeat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth
with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England."
For nearly a generation prior to the Civil War, schoolboys had been declaiming the peroration of his greatest
speech, his Reply to Hayne (1830):--
"When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the
broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a
land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood!"
This peroration brought Webster as an invisible presence into thousands of homes in the North. The hearts of
the listeners would beat faster as the declaimer continued:--
"Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and
honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original luster,
not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured...."
When the irrepressible conflict came, it would be difficult to estimate how many this great oration influenced
to join the army to save the Union. The closing words of that speech, "Liberty and Union, now and forever,
one and inseparable!" kept sounding like the voice of many thunders in the ear of the young men, until they
shouldered their muskets. His Seventh of March Speech (1850), which seemed to the North to make
compromises with slavery, put him under a cloud for awhile, but nothing could stop youth from declaiming
his Reply to Hayne.
Although the majority of orators famous in their day are usually forgotten by the next generation, it is not
CHAPTER IV 76
improbable that three American orations will be quoted hundreds of years hence. So long as the American
retains his present characteristics, we cannot imagine a time when he will forget Patrick Henry's speech in
1775, or Daniel Webster's peroration in his Reply to Hayne, or Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (p.
344), entrusting the American people with the task of seeing "that government of the people, by the people,
and for the people shall not perish from the earth."
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1803-1882
[Illustration: RALPH WALDO EMERSON]
LIFE.--Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most distinguished of New England transcendentalists, came from a
family of clergy. Peter Bulkeley, his ancestor, was the first pastor of Concord in 1635. William Emerson, his
grandfather, was pastor in Concord at the opening of the Revolutionary War and witnessed the fight of
Concord Bridge from the window of the Old Manse, that famous house which he had built and which
Hawthorne afterwards occupied. By that Bridge there stands a monument, commemorating the heroic services
of the men who there made the world-famous stand for freedom. On the base of this monument are Ralph
Waldo Emerson's lines:--
"By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled
farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world."
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803. His father, who was pastor of the First Church in Boston,
died when Ralph Waldo was eight years old, leaving in poverty a widow with six children under ten years of
age. His church promptly voted to pay his widow five hundred dollars a year, for seven years, but even with
this help the family was so poor that in cold weather it was noticed that Ralph and his brother went to school
on alternate days. The boys divined the reason, and were cruel enough to call out, "Whose turn is it to wear
the coat to-day?" But the mother struggled heroically with poverty, and gave her sons a good education.
Ralph Waldo entered Harvard in 1817. He saved the cost of his lodging by being appointed "President's
Freshman," as the official message bearer was called, and earned most of his board by waiting on the table at
the college Commons.
Emerson was descended from such a long line of clergymen that it was natural for him to decide to be a
minister. After graduating at Harvard and taking a course in theology, he received a call from Cotton Mather's
(p. 46) church and preached there for a short time; but he soon resigned because he could not conscientiously
conform to some of the customs of the church. Although he occasionally occupied pulpits for a few years after
this, the greater part of his time for the rest of his life was spent in writing and lecturing.
When he was temporarily preaching in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1827, he met Miss Ellen Tucker, then
sixteen years old. This meeting was for two reasons a noteworthy event in his life. In the first place, her
inspiration aided in the development of his poetical powers. He seemed to hear the children of Nature say to
her:--
"Thou shalt command us all,-- April's cowslip, summer's clover, To the gentian in the fall, Blue-eyed pet of
blue-eyed lover."
[Illustration: ELLEN TUCKER]
His verses tell how the flower and leaf and berry and rosebud ripening into rose had seemed to copy her. He
married her in 1829 and wrote the magnificent prophecy of their future happiness in the poem beginning:--
"And Ellen, when the graybeard years,"
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a poem which he could not bear to have published in his lifetime, for Mrs. Emerson lived but a few years after
their marriage. In the second place, in addition to stimulating his poetical activity, his wife's help did not end
with her death; for she left him a yearly income of twelve hundred dollars, without which he might never have
secured the leisure necessary to enable him "to live in all the faculties of his soul" and to become famous in
American literature.
In the fall of 1833 he sailed for Europe, going by way of the Mediterranean. Returning by way of England, he
met Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle, whose influence he had already felt. His visit to Carlyle led to a
lifelong friendship. Emerson helped to bring out an American edition of the Sartor Resartus (1836) before it
was published in England.
[Illustration: EMERSON'S STUDY]
After returning from Europe, Emerson permanently settled at Concord, Massachusetts, the most famous
literary town of its size in the United States. The appreciation of the Concord people for their home is shown
by the naive story, told by a member of Emerson's family, of a fellow townsman who read of the rapidly
rising price of building lots in Chicago, and remarked, "Can't hardly believe that any lands can be worth so
much money, so far off." After Henry D. Thoreau (p. 194) had received a medal at school for proficiency in
geography, he went home and asked his mother if Boston was located in Concord. It was to Concord that
Emerson brought his second wife, Lidian Jackson Emerson, whom he married in 1835. In Concord he wrote [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]