A healthful old man, to whom sleep was sweet, and the
first sound slumbers of the night held him in their soft but strong
embrace. The assassin enters through the window, already prepared,
into an unoccupied apartment. With noiseless foot he paces the
lonely hall, half lighted by the moon; he winds up the ascent of
the stairs, and reaches to door of the chamber .... The face of
the innocent sleeper is turned from the murderer, and the beams of
the moon, resting on the gray locks of his aged temple, show him
where to strike. The fatal blow is given, and the victim
passes, without a struggle, from the repose of sleep to the repose
of death. The deed is done. He retreats, retraces his steps to
the window, passes out through it as he came in, and escapes.
He has done the murder. No eye has seen him, no ear has heard him.
The secret is his own, and it is safe."

The speech throughout shows Webster to have been the perfect master
of the human heart,--of its manifold and mysterious workings. What
picture could be more vivid than this?

"Such a secret can be safe nowhere. The whole creation of God has
neither nook nor corner where the guilty can bestow it and say
it is safe. Not to speak of that eye which pierces through all
disguises and beholds everything as in the splendor of noon,
such secrets of guilt are never safe from detection even by men.
True it is, generally speaking, that murder will out. True it is,
that Providence hath so ordained, and doth so govern things,
that those who break the great law of Heaven by shedding man's
blood seldom succeed in avoiding discovery. Meantime the guilty
soul cannot keep its own secret. It is false to itself; or rather,
it feels an irresistible impulse of conscience to be true to itself.
It labors under its guilty possession, and knows not what to do
with it. The human heart was not made for the residence of such
an inhabitant."

The closing sentences of the speech--which resulted in the conviction
and execution of the prisoner--will endure in our literature
unsurpassed as an inspiration to duty:

"There is no evil that we cannot either face or fly from but the
consciousness of duty disregarded. A sense of duty pursues us
ever. It is omnipresent like the Deity. If we take to ourselves the
wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the
sea, duty performed, or duty violated, is still with us, for our
happiness or our misery. If we say, 'the darkness