Mr. Winthrop says also truly of Daniel Webster:
"Daniel Webster, unlike Everett or Choate, was all deliberation, both in matter and manner. I do not believe that it ever occurred to him what gestures he should make, or that he ever remembered what gestures he had made. His words seemed to flow spontaneously and often slowly, whether from his lips or his pen, as from a profound and exhaustless reservoir of thought. Of him it might be, and perhaps often has been, said:
"... Deep on his front engraven
Deliberation sat, and public care."
He says of Webster's eloquence that it was the eloquence of clear, cogent argument, and of occasional deep emotion, expressed in clear, forcible Saxon words—sometimes adorned by most felicitous quotations and sometimes by magnificent and matchless metaphors.
James Parton says:
"He discovered, he says, that the value as well as the force of a sentence depends chiefly upon its meaning, not its language, and that great writing is that in which much is said in a few words, and those words the simplest that will answer the purpose. Having made this notable discovery, he became a great eraser of adjectives, and toiled after simplicity and directness."
Edward Everett, who knew Mr. Webster very intimately, says:
"Perhaps the noblest bursts—the loftiest flights, the last and warmest tints of his discourses of this kind—were the unpremeditated inspiration of the moment of delivery."
I suppose, from all I can gather, that Mr. Webster, with very few exceptions indeed, committed to writing nothing but the heads of his speeches. But they were, nearly all of them, upon subjects constantly in his thoughts. He had undoubtedly matured sentences and phrases which came to his mind in leisure moments, and which came to his memory under the stimulant of great occasions and great audiences, in addressing juries or public assemblies or the Senate, with which he ornamented his discourses, or strengthened his argument. Most of the speeches we have only as they came to us in the imperfect reporting of the time. Some of them, like the oration at Plymouth, he probably revised carefully before they were published. We have his own testimony that this was true of the well-known "morning drum-beat" passage in the speech on the President's Protest.
Still, the testimony is abundant that some of his best passages must have come from an inspiration while he was upon his feet. Mr. Winthrop gives an account of one; Mellen Chamberlain, a most accomplished critic and observer, another. And there are plenty of others floating about. Judge Chamberlain says one thing of him, which I dare say may have been said before and since. It explains Webster's influence over his auditors and over posterity. He says: