These attractions were heightened by his large nature and strong animal spirits. He loved outdoor life. He was a keen sportsman and skilful fisherman. In all these ways he was healthy and manly, without any tinge of the mere student or public official. He loved everything that was large. His soul expanded in the free air and beneath the blue sky. All natural scenery appealed to him,--Niagara, the mountains, the rolling prairie, the great rivers,--but he found most contentment beside the limitless sea, amid brown marshes and sand-dunes, where the sense of infinite space is strongest. It was the same in regard to animals. He cared but little for horses or dogs, but he rejoiced in great herds of cattle, and especially in fine oxen, the embodiment of slow and massive strength. In England the things which chiefly appealed to him were the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Smithfield cattle market, and English agriculture. So it was always and everywhere. He loved mountains and great trees, wide horizons, the ocean, the western plains, and the giant monuments of literature and art. He rejoiced in his strength and the overflowing animal vigor that was in him. He was so big and so strong, so large in every way, that people sank into repose in his presence, and felt rest and confidence in the mere fact of his existence. He came to be regarded as an institution, and when he died men paused with a sense of helplessness, and wondered how the country would get on without him. To have filled so large a space in a country so vast, and in a great, hurrying, and pushing democracy, implies a personality of a most uncommon kind.
He was, too, something more than a charming companion in private life. He was generous, liberal, hospitable, and deeply affectionate. He was adored in his home, and deeply loved his children, who were torn from him, one after another. His sorrow, like his joy, was intense and full of force. He had many devoted friends, and a still greater body of unhesitating followers. To the former he showed, through nearly all his life, the warm affection which was natural to him. It was not until adulation and flattery had deeply injured him, and the frustrated ambition for the presidency had poisoned both heart and mind, that he became dictatorial and overbearing. Not till then did he quarrel with those who had served and followed him, as when he slighted Mr. Lawrence for expressing independent opinions, and refused to do justice to the memory of Story because it might impair his own glories. They do not present a pleasant picture, these quarrels with friends, but they were part of the deterioration of the last years, and they furnish in a certain way the key to his failure to attain the presidency. The country was proud of Mr. Webster; proud of his intellect, his eloquence, his fame. He was the idol of the capitalists, the merchants, the lawyers, the clergy, the educated men of all classes in the East. The politicians dreaded and feared him because he was so great, and so little in sympathy with them, but his real weakness was with the masses of the people. He was not popular in the true sense of the word. For years the Whig party and Henry Clay were almost synonymous terms, but this could never be said of Mr. Webster. His following was strong in quality, but weak numerically. Clay touched the popular heart. Webster never did. The people were proud of him, wondered at him, were awed by him, but they did not love him, and that was the reason he was never President, for he was too great to succeed to the high office, as many men have, by happy or unhappy accident. There was also another feeling which is suggested by the differences with some of his closest friends. There was a lurking distrust of Mr. Webster's sincerity. We can see it plainly in the correspondence of the Western Whigs, who were not, perhaps, wholly impartial. But it existed, nevertheless. There was a vague, ill-defined feeling of doubt in the public mind; a suspicion that the spirit of the advocate was the ruling spirit in Mr. Webster, and that he did not believe with absolute and fervent faith in one side of any question. There was just enough correctness, just a sufficient grain of truth in this idea, when united with the coldness and dignity of his manner and with his greatness itself, to render impossible that popularity which, to be real and lasting in a democracy, must come from the heart and not from the head of the people, which must be instinctive and emotional, and not the offspring of reason.