A writer in the _Liberator_ thus recorded his impressions on reading the speech:--
“Never, I think, from anything did I receive an impression of greater power and grandeur. It came over me like the sound of many waters. I laid down the paper, and still there seemed to press around me a solemn, majestic anthem from a mighty organ. I can almost imagine that around that sick-bed the invisible angels gather, and that on that bruised and mangled head the rays of a divine halo gleam between the blossoms of an imperishable wreath.”
Another writer, in a country journal of Massachusetts, expresses himself thus:--
“It were the merest commonplace to say that Massachusetts may well be proud of her son. She owes him a debt which she can never fitly discharge. I would avoid estimating him too highly; but it seems to me that it may be said without extravagance, that to much of the firmly knit strength and unassailable logic of a Webster he unites all the fire and fervor of an Otis, with the grace and classic elegance of an Everett. But underlying, interpenetrating, and informing all this brilliancy of genius is the earnest philanthropy of the man,--a philanthropy which gives an effect to all his productions, which the cold-blooded politician, or statesman, even, can never hope to attain. His words go straight to the popular heart, and find there an earnest and immediate response.”
The Rev. Gilbert Haven, in a published sermon at Westfield, Massachusetts, spoke thus:--
“Read the great speech which excited such rage, and won for its author the crown of a martyr. For, before he uttered a word, he knew its probable effect; he measured the danger before he struck the blow. But three or four in all history are its equals in beauty and strength of thought and language,--Demosthenes against the Philipizing Douglas of Athens, the keen, ready, insolent tool of her tyrants,--Cicero against the Atchison Catiline of the Roman Republic,--Burke against the wholesale enslaver of India, Hastings,--Webster against the South Carolinian traducer of Freedom and its fruits: with these four, this stands, and will always stand, equal to the highest in all the literary qualities of an oration, higher than the highest in the sweep of his theme,--the preservation of the liberty, culture, and religion of a great Christian nation.”