This passage is from the Dartmouth College address, and it has all the flowing cadence of a discourse written to be spoken. Yet Emerson had little of the orator's temperament save the desire of an audience, and an earnestness which was pure and not passionate. But no orator in the country has exercised a deeper or more permanent influence. His discourses were but essays, but their thought was so noble, their form so symmetrical, their tone so lofty, and they were spoken with such alluring rhythm, that they threw over young minds a spell which no other eloquence could command. Emerson himself was very susceptible to the power of fine oratory. No man ever praised more warmly the charm of Everett in his earlier day. When Webster delivered his eulogy upon Adams and Jefferson in Faneuil Hall, Emerson was teaching in Cambridge, and Richard H. Dana, Jun., was one of his pupils. The day before Webster spoke, the teacher announced that there would be no school upon the morrow, and he earnestly exhorted his pupils not to lose the memorable opportunity of hearing the great orator. Dana was of an age to prefer fishing to oratory, and strolled off with his line to the river, where he passed the day. When school was resumed, Mr. Emerson with sympathetic interest asked him if he had heard Webster. The fisher, half ashamed, reluctantly owned his absence. Emerson looked at him with regret and almost pain, and said to him, gravely: "My boy, I am very sorry; you have lost what you can never recover, and what you will regret to the last day of your life." But those who heard his own Divinity School address, or the Cambridge or Dartmouth oration, or the Emancipation address, would not exchange that recollection even to have heard the Olympian orator in Faneuil Hall. "Tell me," said a Senator famous for his oratory, to a friend in Washington, "what do you call eloquence? Repeat to me an eloquent passage." The friend quoted from Emerson the unequalled passage from the Dartmouth College address in which the scholar appeals to the young men to be true to the ideals of their youth--a passage which no generous youth can read to-day without deep emotion and a thrill of high resolve. The Senator listened with an air of perplexed incredulity. "Do you call that eloquent? Now see what I call eloquence," and he declaimed a glowing piece of rhetoric with ardent feeling. It was a passage from Charles Sprague's Fourth-of-July oration in Boston sixty years ago. But effective as it was, his friend reminded the Senator that if the test of eloquence be glow of feeling and splendor and sincerity of expression, with an inner power of appeal which searches the heart and moulds the life, no really greater results in this country could be traced to any speech than to that of Emerson, who read the greater part of his essays as addresses, and who sometimes reached a lyrical strain which not the magnificent Burke nor any other great orator surpasses.