The applause sunk down, and an expectant, breathless hush succeeded. Slowly his lips curved apart, and the clear, persuasive silver of his voice flowed into words. It was a simple and ordinary sentence, and yet what a fascination it had! It was not a sentence—it was something bright that flew into the souls of his audience; and as it flew, the magnetic glance of his eye seemed to follow it, and every one was captive. His address was at once exposition and criticism. The condition of the nation, the aggressions of the slave oligarchy, the recent plunder of Mexico for the extension of slavery, the servility of the pulpit, the pro-slavery scheming of Northern merchants and manufacturers—these were his themes, and how he treated them! He was not in his loftiest lyric mood that night, and his speech only rose now and then from its tone of exquisite impressive colloquy into the long, imperial sweep of the oration; but still, as Thomas Davis said of Curran, his words went forth in robes of light with swords. Shapes of severest crystal grace that moved to Dorian music, an armed battalia, a bright procession, the splendid phrases trooped, with strength to strike and skill to guard for liberty and justice. What language—so finely chosen, so apt, terse, limpid, electrical! What logic—proof-mail of gold and steel around his thought, or a smiting weapon of celestial temper! Now came some metaphor so analogically related to the theme that it flashed on the mind like a subtle argument. And now a sentence shining upon the imagination with the beauty of an antique frieze. Here was an expression that memory would wear like a gem-cameo forever. And here some jewel of classic story re-cut more purely, or some historic picture that glowed sharp, definite, in lines and hues of life, upon the eye of the mind. Now it was the scimitar-glance of wit shearing the floating film of some intangible popular delusion, or lie. Now some homely illustration borrowed from the street, the shop, the farm, yet suddenly interpenetrated with as strange a poetic grace as though it had dropped from the lips of Tully two thousand years ago. Or here again invective, rising above some gloomy wrong, and smiting bright, like the diamond sword of Dante’s black-stoled angel. Rhetoric, yet not the artificial, decorative rhetoric of the schools, but an organic growth of the man. Art, but art that seemed like nature, for it was the art that nature makes. One felt, and truly felt, in listening to the orator, that this was his natural normal speech. It was beautiful, it was ornate, it was artistic, but it was of the heart, it was of the life; and everywhere it was the stern, the solemn voice of conscience, of honor, of virtue—everywhere it was terrible and sacred with radiant pity for the poor and weak, flaming scorn for the traitor and the oppressor, burning love for liberty and justice. But who is he that shall so much as hint description of the classic grace, the