A Biography of Henry Clay, the Senator from Kentucky: Containing Also, a Complete Report of All His Speeches; Selections From His Private Correspondence; Eulogies in the Senate and House; and a Poem, by George D. Prentice, Esq.
History
A Biography of Henry Clay, the Senator from Kentucky: Containing Also, a Complete Report of All His Speeches; Selections From His Private Correspondence; Eulogies in the Senate and House; and a Poem, by George D. Prentice, Esq.
Clay, Henry, 1777-1852; Speeches, addresses, etc., American
At the bar and in the General Assembly of Kentucky, Mr. Clay first
manifested those high qualities as a public speaker which have secured
to him so much popular applause and admiration. His physical and mental
organization eminently qualified him to become a great and impressive
orator. His person was tall, slender, and commanding. His temperament
ardent, fearless, and full of hope. His countenance clear, expressive,
and variable――indicating the emotion which predominated at the moment
with exact similitude. His voice, cultivated and modulated in harmony
with the sentiment he desired to express, fell upon the ear like the
melody of enrapturing music. His eye beaming with intelligence and
flashing with coruscations of genius. His gestures and attitudes
graceful and natural. These personal advantages won the prepossessions
of an audience, even before his intellectual powers began to move his
hearers; and when his strong common sense, his profound reasoning, his
clear conceptions of his subject in all its bearings, and his striking
and beautiful illustrations, united with such personal qualities, were
brought to the discussion of any question, his audience was enraptured,
convinced, and led by the orator as if enchanted by the lyre of Orpheus.
No man was ever blessed by his Creator with faculties of a higher order
of excellence than those given to Mr. Clay. In the quickness of his
perceptions, and the rapidity with which his conclusions were formed,
he had few equals and no superior. He was eminently endowed with a nice,
discriminating taste for order, symmetry, and beauty. He detected in a
moment every thing out of place or deficient in his room, upon his farm,
in his own or the dress of others. He was a skilful judge of the form
and qualities of his domestic animals, which he delighted to raise on
his farm. I could give you instances of the quickness and minuteness
of his keen faculty of observation which never overlooked any thing. A
want of neatness and order was offensive to him. He was particular and
neat in his handwriting and his apparel. A slovenly blot or negligence
of any sort met his condemnation; while he was so organized that he
attended to, and arranged little things to please and gratify his
natural love for neatness, order, and beauty, his great intellectual
faculties grasped all the subjects of jurisprudence and politics with
a facility amounting almost to intuition. As a lawyer, he stood at the
head of his profession. As a statesman, his stand at the head of the
Republican Whig party for nearly half a century, establishes his title
to preeminence among his illustrious associates.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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