By day its voice is low and light;
But in the silent dead of night,
Distinct as a passing footstep's fall,
It echoes along the vacant hall,
Along the ceiling, along the floor,

And seems to say, at each chamber door, -
"Forever never!

Never forever!"

Through days of sorrow and of mirth,
Through days of death and days of birth,
Through every swift vicissitude

Of changeful time, unchanged it has stood,
And as if, like God, it all things saw,
It calmly repeats those words of awe,

There groups of merry children played;

There youths and maidens dreaming strayed.

O precious hours! O golden prime,
And affluence of love and time!

Even as a miser counts his gold,
Those hours the ancient timepiece told, -
"Forever never!

From that chamber, clothed in white,

The bride came forth on her wedding night;
There, in that silent room below,

The dead lay in his shroud of snow;
And in the hush that followed prayer,
Was heard the old clock on the stair, -
"Forever

- never!

DANIEL WEBSTER was born at Salisbury, New Hampshire, January 18, 1782; and died at Marshfield, Massachusetts, October 24, 1852. He was graduated at Dartmouth College in 1801, was admitted to the bar in 1805, and settled in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1807. He was a member of the House of Representatives from New Hampshire from 1813 to 1817. In the latter part of 1816 he removed to Boston, and resided in that city, or at Marshfield, during the remainder of his life. He was chosen to the House of Representatives from the district of Boston, in 1822, and was a member of that body till 1827, when he was elected to the United States Senate by the Legislature of Massachusetts. He continued there during the remainder of his life, with the exception of two intervals, when he held the office of Secretary of State, first under the administrations of Presidents Harrison and Tyler, and secondly under that of President Fillmore.

For the last twenty-five years of his life, Mr. Webster's biography is identified with the history of his country Having been a leader of one of its great political parties, the time has hardly yet come for a calm and unbiassed judgment to be passed upon his services; but no candid mind will ever question the sincerity and comprehensiveness of his patriotism, still less the splendor of his intellectual powers. He was a great lawyer, a great statesman, a great debater, and a great writer. As a writerin which point of view alone we have now to regard him he stands among the very first of his class. No style can be found more suited for the subjects of which it treats than his. It is strong, simple, and dignified; vehement and impassioned when necessary; readily rising into eloquence, and occasionally touched with high imaginative beauty. He excels in the statement of a case or the exposition of a principle; and in his occasional discourses there are passages of a lofty moral grandeur by which the heart and mind are alike affected. Some of his state papers may fairly challenge comparison with the best productions of the kind which the past has transmitted to us.

The following passage is taken from a discourse, pronounced at Plymouth, December 22, 1820, in commemoration of the first settlement of New England.

F the blessings of our political and social condition

have not been too highly estimated, we cannot well overrate the responsibility which they impose upon us. We hold these institutions of government, religion, and learning to be transmitted as well as enjoyed. We are in the line of conveyance through which whatever has been obtained by the spirit and efforts of our ancestors is to be communicated to our children.

We are bound to maintain public liberty, and, by the example of our own systems, to convince the world that

order and law, religion and morality, the rights of conscience, the rights of persons, and the rights of property, may all be preserved and secured in the most perfect manner by a government entirely and purely elective. If we fail in this, our disaster will be signal, and will furnish an argument, stronger than has yet been found, in support of those opinions which maintain that government can rest safely on nothing but power and coer

cion.

As far as experience may show errors in our establishments, we are bound to correct them; and if any practices exist contrary to the principles of justice and humanity, within the reach of our laws or our influence, we are inexcusable if we do not exert ourselves to restrain and abolish them.

I deem it my duty on this occasion to suggest that the land is not yet wholly free from the contamination of a traffic at which every feeling of humanity must revolt, I mean the African slave-trade. Neither public sentiment nor the law has yet been able entirely to put an end to this odious and abominable trade. At the moment when God in his mercy has blessed the world with a universal peace, there is reason to fear that, to the disgrace of the Christian name and character, new efforts are making for the extension of this trade, by subjects and citizens of Christian states, in whose hearts no sentiment of justice inhabits, and over whom neither the fear of God nor the fear of man exercises a control.

In the sight of our law, the African slave-trader is a pirate and a felon; and in the sight of Heaven, an offender far beyond the ordinary depth of human guilt. There is no brighter part of our history than that which records. the measures which have been adopted by the govern

ment at an early day, and at different times since, for the suppression of this traffic; and I would call upon all the true sons of New England to co-operate with the laws of man and the justice of Heaven.

If there be, within the extent of our knowledge or influence, any participation in this traffic, let us pledge ourselves here, upon the Rock of Plymouth, to extirpate and destroy it. It is not fit that the land of the Pilgrims should bear the shame longer. I hear the sound of the hammer, I see the smoke of the furnaces where manacles and fetters are still forged for human limbs. I see the visages of those who, by stealth and at midnight, labor in this work of hell, foul and dark, as may become the artificers of such instruments of misery and torture. Let that spot be purified, or let it cease to be of New England. Let it be purified, or let it be set aside from the Christian world; let it be put out of the circle of human sympathies and human regards; and let civilized man henceforth have no communion with it.

I would invoke those who fill the seats of justice, and all who minister at her altar, that they execute the wholesome and necessary severity of the law. I invoke the ministers of our religion, that they proclaim its denunciation of these crimes, and add its solemn sanctions to the authority of human laws. If the pulpit be silent, whenever or wherever there may be a sinner, bloody with this guilt, within the hearing of its voice, the pulpit is false to its trust.

I call on the fair merchant, who has reaped his harvest upon the seas, that he assist in scourging from those seas the worst pirates that ever infested them. That ocean which seems to wave with a gentle magnificence, to waft the burdens of an honest commerce, and to roll its treas