CHAPTER VIII
MARSHFIELD, THE HOME OF DANIEL WEBSTER
Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free!
Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!
Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun,
Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won
God out of knowledge, and good out of infinite pain,
And sight out of blindness, and purity out of a stain.
It was these mighty marshes—this ample sweep of grass, of sea and sky—this vast earthly and heavenly spaciousness that must forever stand to all New Englanders as a background to the powerful personality who chose it as his own home. Daniel Webster, when his eyes first turned to this infinite reach of largeness, instinctively knew it as the place where his splendid senses would find satisfaction, and his splendid mind would soar into an even loftier freedom. Webster loved Marshfield with an intensity that made it peculiarly his own. Lanier, in language more intricate and tropical, exclaimed of his "dim sweet" woods: "Ye held me fast in your heart, and I held you fast in mine." Webster wielded the vital union between his nature and that of the land not only by profound sentiment, but by a vigorous physical grappling with the soil.
Is it that vivid natures unconsciously seek an environment characteristic of them? Or are they, perhaps, inevitably forced to create such an environment wherever they find themselves? Both facts seem true in this case. This wide world of marsh and sea is not only beautifully expressive of one who plunged himself into a rich communion with the earth, with her full harvests and blooded cattle, with her fruitful brooks and lakes; but it is still, after more than half a century, vibrant with the spirit of the man who dwelt there.
We of another generation—and a generation before whom so many portentous events and figures have passed—find it hard to realize the tremendous magnetism and brilliancy of a man who has been so long dead, or properly to estimate the high historical significance of such a life. The human attribute which is the most immediately impelling in direct intercourse—personality—is the most elusive to preserve. If Webster's claim to remembrance rested solely upon that attribute, he would still be worthy of enduring fame. But his gifts flowered at a spectacular climax of national affairs and won thereby spectacular prominence. That these gifts were to lose something of their pristine repute before the end infuses, from a dramatic point of view, a contrasted and heightened luster to the period of their highest glory.
Let us, casual travelers of a later and more careless day, walk now together over the place which is the indestructible memorial of a great man, and putting aside the measuring-stick of criticism—the sign of small natures—try to live for an hour in the atmosphere which was the breath of life to one who, if he failed greatly, also succeeded greatly, and whose noble achievement it was not only to express, but to vivify a love for the Union which, in its hour of supreme trial, became its triumphant force.