The Last Harvest by John Burroughs

How fruitful in striking and original men New England was in those days -- poets, orators, picturesque characters! In Concord, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Alcott; in Boston and Cambridge, Lowell, Longfellow, Norton, Holmes, Higginson, Father Taylor, Bancroft, Everett, and others, with Webster standing out like a Colossus on the New Hampshire granite. This crop of geniuses seems to have been the aftermath of the Revolution. Will our social and industrial revolution bring anything like another such a crop? Will the great World War produce another? Until now too much prosperity, too much mammon, too much "at ease in Zion" has certainly prevailed for another band of great idealists to appear.

Emerson could never keep his eyes off Webster. He was fairly hypnotized by the majesty and power of his mind and personality, and he recurs to him in page after page of his Journal. Webster was of primary stuff like the granite of his native hills, while such a man as Everett was of the secondary formation, like the sandstone rocks. Emerson was delighted when he learned that Carlyle, "with those devouring eyes, with that portraying hand," had seen Webster. And this is the portrait Carlyle drew of him: "As a Logic-fencer, Advocate, or Parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him at first sight against all the extant world. The tanned complexion, that amorphous, crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be _blown_; the mastiff-mouth, accurately closed: -- I have not traced as much of _silent Berserkir-rage_, that I remember of, in any other man."