now only remembering; and what a stately and solemn image it is to
remember!

* * * * *

William H. Seward, unlike Webster, had the handicap of an unimpressive
exterior, nor had his voice the profound and conquering note which
is so potent an ally of the mind in subduing men. I heard Seward's
oration at Plymouth in 1855, a worthy effort which may be read in his
works, but I do better here to pick up only the straws, not meddling
with the heavy-garnered wheat. I recall an inconspicuous figure, of
ordinary stature, and a face whose marked feature was the large nose
(Emerson called it "corvine"), but that, as some one has said, is the
hook which nature makes salient in the case of men whom fortune is
to drag forward into leadership. He spoke in the pulpit of my
grandfather, who at the time had been for nearly sixty years minister
of the old Pilgrim parish. From that coign of vantage, my faithful
grandsire had no doubt smoked out many a sinner, and had not been
sparing of the due polemic fulminations in times of controversy. The
old theology, too, had undergone at his hands faithful fumigation to
make it sanitary for the modern generations. From one kind of smoke,
however, that venerable pulpit had been free until the hour of
Seward's arrival. It arched my eyebrows well when I saw him at the end
of his address light a cigar in the very shrine, a burnt-offering, in
my good grandfather's eyes certainly, more fitting for altars satanic.
My grandfather promptly called him down, great man though he was,
a rub which the statesman received from the white-haired minister,
good-naturedly postponing his smoke. But Seward rode rough-shod too
often over conventions, and sometimes over real proprieties. In an
over-convivial frame once, his tongue, loosened by champagne, nearly