Here he enjoyed the ocean as he had enjoyed it in his boyhood, and years later, when his brain was tired from overwork, he would exclaim, plaintively, "Oh, Marshfield! the Sea! the Sea!"
This year also Webster paid a visit to Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. In his conversation with the ex-President, he told this story of himself, which well illustrates the fact that all the knowledge which we can acquire becomes of use to us at one time or another in life. When a young lawyer in Portsmouth, a blacksmith brought him a case under a will. As the case was a difficult one, he spent one month in the study of it, buying fifty dollars' worth of books to help him in the matter. He argued the case, won it, and received a fee of fifteen dollars. Years after, Aaron Burr sent for him to consult with him on a legal question of consequence. The case was so similar to that of the blacksmith that Webster could cite all the points bearing upon it from the time of Charles II. Mr. Burr was astonished, and suspected he was the counsel for the opposite side. Webster received enough compensation from Burr to cover the loss of time and money in the former case, and gained, besides, Burr's admiration and respect.
In the winter of 1824, Webster's youngest child, Charles, died, at the age of two years. Mrs. Webster wrote her absent husband, "I have dreaded the hour which should destroy your hopes, but trust you will not let this event afflict you too much, and that we both shall be able to resign him without a murmur, happy in the reflection that he has returned to his Heavenly Father pure as I received him.... Do not, my dear husband, talk of your own 'final abode;' that is a subject I never can dwell on for a moment. With you here, my dear, I can never be desolate. Oh, may Heaven, in its mercy, long preserve you!"
Four years later, "the blessed wife," as he called her, went to her "final abode." Mr. Webster watched by her side till death took her. Then at the funeral, in the wet and cold of that January day, he walked close behind the hearse, holding Julia and Fletcher, his two children, by the hand. Her body was placed beneath St. Paul's Church, Boston, beside her children. All were removed afterward to Marshfield.
Webster went back to Washington, having been made United States senator, but he seemed broken-hearted, and unable to perform his duties. He wrote to a friend, "Like an angel of God, indeed. I hope she is in purity, in happiness, and in immortality; but I would fain hope that, in kind remembrance of those she has left, in a lingering human sympathy and human love, she may yet be, as God originally created her, a 'little lower than the angels.' I cannot pursue these thoughts, nor turn back to see what I have written." Again he wrote, "I feel a vacuum, an indifference, a want of motive, which I cannot describe. I hope my children, and the society of my best friends, may rouse me; but I can never see such days as I have seen. Yet I should not repine; I have enjoyed much, very much; and, if I were to die to-night, I should bless God most fervently that I have lived."
Judge Story spoke of Mrs. Webster as a sister with "her kindness of heart, her generous feelings, her mild and conciliatory temper, her warm and elevated affections, her constancy, purity, and piety, her noble disinterestedness, and her excellent sense."
Later, Mr. Webster married Caroline Le Roy, the daughter of a New York merchant, but no affection ever effaced from his heart the memory of Grace Webster, whom he always spoke of as "the mother of his children."
The next year, 1829, his idolized brother Ezekiel died suddenly at forty-nine, while he was addressing a jury in the court-house at Concord, New Hampshire.
Daniel Webster said of this shock, "I have felt but one such in life; and this follows so soon that it requires more fortitude than I possess to bear it with firmness, and, perhaps, as I ought. I am aware that the case admits no remedy, nor any present relief; and endeavor to console myself with reflecting that I have had much happiness with lost connections, and that they must expect to lose beloved objects in this world who have beloved objects to lose."
Recently, at the home of Kate Sanborn in New York, the grand-niece of Daniel Webster, I met the sweet-faced wife of Ezekiel, young in her feelings and young in face despite her four-score years. Here I saw a picture of the great orator in his youth, the desk on which he wrote, and scores of mementos of Marshfield and "Elms Farms," treasured by the cultivated woman who bears token of her renowned kinship.