I had just time to hear
this sentence, and shut the door and hurry to my train: "She
went down the harbor, painted and perfidious--a coffin, but
no ship."
I hear now, as if still in the eager throng, his speech in
Faneuil Hall during the Mexican War. He demanded that we
should bring back our soldiers to the line we claimed as
our rightful boundary, and let Mexico go. He said we had
done enough for glory, and that we had humiliated her enough.
"The Mexican maiden, as she sits with her lover among the
orange-groves, will sing to her guitar the story of these
times--'Ah, woe is me, Alhama,' for a thousand years to come."
Choate, like other good orators, and like some great poets,
notably Wordsworth, created the taste which he satisfied.
His dramatic action, his marvellous and strange vocabulary,
his oriental imagination, his dressing the common and mean
things of life with a poetic charm and romance, did not at
once strike favorably the taste of his Yankee audiences.
Webster and Everett seem to have appreciated him from the
first. But he was, till he vindicated his title to be a great
lawyer, rather a thorn in the flesh of Chief Justice Shaw, of
whose consternation and amazement, caused by the strange
figure that appeared in his court-room, many queer stories
used to be told.
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