"I was in the House of Representatives but a single hour.
While I was present there was no direct discussion of the
agitating subject which already filled everybody's mind, but
still the excitement flared out occasionally in incidental
allusions to it, like puffs of smoke and jets of flame which
issue from a house that is on fire within. I recollect that
Clay made a brief speech, thrilling the House by a single
passage, in which he spoke of '_poor, unheard Missouri_' she
being then without a representative in Congress. His tall,
tossing form, his long, sweeping gestures, and, above all,
his musical yet thrilling tones, made an impression upon me
which I can never forget."

Mr. Clay, at length, had completed his preparations. He moved for a
committee of the House to confer with a committee of the Senate. He
himself wrote out the list of members whom he desired should be
elected, and they were elected. At the last conference of the joint
committees, which was held on a Sunday, Mr. Clay insisted that their
report, to have the requisite effect upon Congress and the country,
must be unanimous; and unanimous it was. Both Houses, with a
surprising approach to unanimity, adopted the compromise proposed; and
thus was again postponed the bloody arbitrament to which the
irrepressible controversy has since been submitted.

Clay's masterly conduct on this occasion added his name to the long
list of gentlemen who were mentioned for the succession to Mr. Monroe
in 1825. If the city of Washington had been the United States, if the
House of Representatives had possessed the right to elect a President,
Henry Clay might have been its choice. During the thirteen years of
his Speakership not one of his decisions had been reversed; and he had
presided over the turbulent and restive House with that perfect
blending of courtesy and firmness which at once restrains and charms.
The debates just before the war, during the war, and after the war,
had been violent and acrimonious; but he had kept his own temper, and
compelled the House to observe an approach to decorum. On one occasion
he came into such sharp collision with the excitable Randolph, that
the dispute was transferred to the newspapers, and narrowly escaped
degenerating from a war of "cards" to a conflict with pistols. But the
Speaker triumphed; the House and the country sustained him. On
occasions of ceremony the Speaker enchan