of feeling as their eyes met! Mr. Webster entered his carriage and
proceeded on his journey; but Goodridge,--who has since ever heard of
him?

This story is a slight digression, but it illustrates that hold on
reality, that truth to fact, which was one of the sources of the force
and simplicity of Mr. Webster's mature style. He, however, only obtained
these good qualities of rhetoric by long struggles with constant
temptations, in his early life, to use resounding expressions and
flaring images which he had not earned the right to use. His Fourth of
July oration at Hanover, when he was only eighteen, and his college
addresses, must have been very bad in their diction if we can judge of
them by the style of his private correspondence at the time. The verses
he incorporates in his letters are deformed by all the faults of false
thinking and borrowed expression which characterized contemporary
American imitators of English imitators of Pope and Gray. Think of the
future orator, lawyer, and senator writing, even at the age of twenty,
such balderdash as this!

"And Heaven grant me, whatever luck betide,
Be fame or fortune given or denied,
Some cordial friend to meet my warm desire,
Honest as John and good as Nehemiah."

In reading such couplets we are reminded of the noted local poet of New
Hampshire (or was it Maine?) who wrote "The Shepherd's Songs," and some
of whose rustic lines still linger in the memory to be laughed at, such,
for instance, as these:--

"This child who perished in the fire,--