He alone of men did not disappoint the eye and the ear, but was a fit figure in the landscape.

There was the Monument, and there was Webster.

He knew well that a little more or less of rhetoric signified nothing; he was only to say plain and equal things--grand things, if he had them; and if he had them not, only to abstain from saying unfit things--and the whole occasion was answered by his presence." He went almost through his weighty discourse without much effect upon his auditors other than that which Emerson so well described.

But the wind changed before he finished, and blew toward the other quarter where the boys stood; and he almost lifted them from their feet as his great organ tones rolled out his closing sentences: "And when both we and our children shall have been consigned to the house appointed for all living, may love of country and pride of country glow with equal fervor among those to whom our names and our blood shall have descended! And then, when honored and decrepit age shall lean against the base of this monument, and troops of ingenuous youth shall be gathered around it, and when the one shall speak to the other of its objects, the purposes of its construction, and the great and glorious events with which it is connected, there shall rise from every youthful breast the ejaculation, 'Thank God, I also--AM AN AMERICAN!'" Mr.Webster came to Concord in the summer of 1843 as counsel for William Wyman, President of the Phoenix Bank of Charlestown, who was indicted for embezzling the funds of the bank.

This was one of the _causes celebres_ of the day.