Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 October 1878 — Choate and Webster. [ARTICLE]

Choate and Webster.

Perhaps the weight and power of Webster’s character were due to the hours he spent in the woods and fields and on the ocean, chatting with the farmers or sailors, as he was engaged in hunting and fishing, as to the hours he spent in his study. Now Choate, superior to Webster in quickness of apprehension and imagination, was an in-doors man. The larger portion of his mature life was passed in the stifling atmosphere of the courts, or in what Milton calls “ the still air of delightful studies;” that is, in his library. He, of course, was not so foolish as to neglect exercise; but his exercise was commonly confined to long walks through the streets or around the Common of Boston. No one ever enjoyed nature more intensely; but he never sojourned with her. His friend Charles G. Loring, one of his competitors for the leadership of the Suffolk bar, once invited him to pass a summer day at his beautiful residence on the Beverly shore. Mr. Choate was full of enthusiasm as he walked among the woodland paths, or gazed at the varying aspects of sky and ocean; he doubtless stored up in his mind images of natural beauty which flashed out afterward in many a popular speech or legal argument; but he exhausted the capacity of the place to feed his eye and imagination in half a dozen hours. “My dear Loring,” he said, in parting, “there has not been a twentieth part of a minute since I entered this terrestrial paradise that I have not enjoyed myself to the top of my bent; but let me tell you that should you confine me here for a week, apart from my work and books, I know that I should die from ennui. You are fortunate in being able serenely to delight in it day after day.” If he had been asked to pass a fortnight with Webster at Marshfield, or at his New Hampshire farm, and had accompanied him day after day in his shooting and fishing expeditions, not even Webster’s conversation could have saved him from being devoured with an impatient desire to escape from the monotony of such an existence. All the eccentric originals of the neighborhood, whom Webster delighted in year after year, he would have been delighted in for a day, and then dismissed them from his mind as intolerable bores; the mountain or ocean scenery might have enthralled him for a few days more; but the shooting and fishing, in which Webster took such pleasure, would have seemed to him a scandalous waste of time, which might have been more profitably bestowed on jEschylus and Aristophanes, on Thuycidides and Tacitus, on Hooker and Jeremy Taylor, on Bacon and Burke, on Shakspeare and Milton. In one particular Choate excelled Webster—that of constant high-bred courtesy to men and women of all ranks. —Edwin P. Whipple, in Harper's Magazine for November.