MARSHALL PINCKNET WILDEE. 



ously witnessed. Mr. Wilder delivered an address, and presided at the agricultural 

 banquet, announcing with aptness and dignity a number of appropriate sentiments. 

 To these, responses were offered by Hon. Mr. Campbell of Ohio, Cassius M. Clay of 

 Kentucky, Governor Wright of Indiana, the Presidents of State Agi-icultural Societies, 

 and other gentlemen of distinction. Of his speech the papers remark: "He addressed 

 the assembled host in dignified and eloquent style. Ho spoke, as may readily be 

 imagined, cheered in heart, at the spiiit manifested in the great cause of agriculture, 

 by the hardy yeomanry who had come up hither, and joined in the pleasures as well as 

 exercises of the occasion. His remarks were received with interruptions of applause, 

 and demonstrations of great approbation." This association is largely indebted to 

 him for its progress and prosperity. 



Though he is emphatically a citizen of the ivhole country, truly American in senti- 

 ment and feeling; yet he possesses strong local attachments, an ardent love to the 

 State of his nativity and to that of his adoption. From the first he took an active part 

 in the association called "The Sons of New Hampshire;" a society which consists of 

 the male offspring of that State resident in Boston and vicinity, a society of which the 

 Hon. Daniel Webster was the first President, and Mr. Wilder the second. One pre- 

 sided at its first festival, the other at the second. On the form-er occasion, Mr. Wilder, 

 who answered for the Governor's Council, closes his speech with the following illusion 

 to New Hampshire: 



"She has raised men — great men — and had she performed no other service, this alone 

 were sufficient to associate her name with Sparta and Athens, in the lustory of mankind. 

 Iler Stark, to whom you have so happily alluded, Mr. President, was a modern Leoxidas; 

 and, among her orators (pointing to Mr. Webster), no one would hesitate to point out a 

 Demosthenes." 



He was a great admirer of Mr. Webster, and when the great expounder of the 

 Constitution died, there was no more sincere mourner than Mr. Wilder. He noticed 

 the melancholy event on four distinct public occassions. The first was on the 30th of 

 November, 1852, the day of the celebration of the obsequies of Mr. Webster in Bos- 

 ton, when at the head of many hundreds of the sons of New Hampshire, residents in 

 that city and its suburbs, he received the Executive and Legislature of his native State, 

 escorted them to the Capitol, and introduced them to the Executive and Legislature of 

 Massachusetts, where he said: 



"A mighty one has fallen! Car elder brother. New Hampshire's favorite son, is no 

 more. All that was mortal of Daniel Webster, the great expounder of constitutional 

 authority, and national rights, has been consigned to the bosom of his mother earth. The 

 loss to us, to the country, and to the world, is irreparable. The whole nation mourns. 

 Our city is hung in the drapery of woe, and the mourners go about the streets. 



The second was at the anniversary of the United States Agricultural Society in the 

 city of Washington, February 2, 1853, when he thus introduced the subject: 



" Tlie Marshfield farmer is numbered with the mighty dead. He was a farmer — the son 

 of a farmer — and the noblest product of American soil." 



And concluded with this beautiful apostrophe 



"Yes sainted patriot! Therc^ in those celestial fields, where the sickle of the Great 



