Great political and revolutionary leaders may, and often must, have in them something of the visionary; but it must never cause them to get out of touch with the practical.

Burr was capable of conceiving revolutionary plans on so vast a scale as to be fairly appalling, not only from their daring but from their magnitude.

But when he tried to put his plans into practice, it at once became evident that they were even more unsubstantial than they were audacious.

His wild schemes had in them too strong an element of the unreal and the grotesque to be in very fact dangerous.
The West Had Grown Loyal.
Besides, the time for separatist movements in the West had passed, while the time for arousing the West to the conquest of part of Spanish-America had hardly yet come.

A man of Burr's character might perhaps have accomplished something mischievous in Kentucky when Wilkinson was in the first flush of his Spanish intrigues; or when the political societies were raving over Jay's treaty; or when the Kentucky legislature was passing its nullification resolutions.