as put, Patrick Henry, knowing that
the result would be against him, and knowing, also, from the angry
things uttered within that House and outside of it, that much
solicitude was abroad respecting the course likely to be taken by the
defeated party, then and there spoke these noble words:--

"I beg pardon of this House for having taken up more time
than came to my share, and I thank them for the patience and
polite attention with which I have been heard. If I shall be
in the minority, I shall have those painful sensations which
arise from a conviction of being overpowered in a good
cause. Yet I will be a peaceable citizen. My head, my hand,
and my heart shall be at liberty to retrieve the loss of
liberty, and remove the defects of that system in a
constitutional way. I wish not to go to violence, but will
wait, with hopes that the spirit which predominated in the
Revolution is not yet gone, nor the cause of those who are
attached to the Revolution yet lost. I shall therefore
patiently wait in expectation of seeing that government
changed, so as to be compatible with the safety, liberty,
and happiness of the people."[386]

Those words of the great Virginian leader proved to be a message of
reassurance to many an anxious citizen, in many a State,--not least
so to that great citizen who, from the slopes of Mount Vernon, was
then watching, night and day, for signs of some abatement in the storm
of civil discord. Those words, too, have, in our time, won for the
orator who spoke them the deliberate, and the almost lyrical, applause
of the greatest historian who has yet laid hand on the story of the
Constitution: "Henry showed his genial nature, free from all
malignity. He was like a billow of the ocean on the first bright day
after the storm, dashing itself against the rocky cliff, and then,
sparkling with light, retreating to its home."[387]

Long after the practical effects of the Virginia convention of 1788
had been merged in the general political life of the country, that
convention was still proudly remembered for the magnificent exertions
of intellectual power, and particularly of eloquence, which it had
called forth. So lately as the year 1857, there was still living a man
who, in his youth, had often looked in upon that famous convention,
and whose enthusiasm, in recalling its great scenes, was not to be
chilled even by the frosts of his n