must have their advocates of each improvement and each interest. Then
the political questions, which agitate millions, find or form a class of
men by nature and habit fit to discuss and deal with these measures, and
make them intelligible and acceptable to the electors. So of education,
of art, of philanthropy.
Eloquence shows the power and possibility of man. There is one of whom
we took no note, but on a certain occasion it appears that he has a
secret virtue never suspected,--that he can paint what has occurred, and
what must occur, with such clearness to a company, as if they saw it
done before their eyes. By leading their thought he leads their will,
and can make them do gladly what an hour ago they would not believe that
they could be led to do at all: he makes them glad or angry or penitent
at his pleasure; of enemies makes friends, and fills desponding men with
hope and joy. After Sheridan's speech in the trial of Warren Hastings,
Mr. Pitt moved an adjournment, that the House might recover from the
overpowering effect of Sheridan's oratory. Then recall the delight that
sudden eloquence gives,--the surprise that the moment is so rich. The
orator is the physician. Whether he speaks in the Capitol or on a cart,
he is the benefactor that lifts men above themselves, and creates a
higher appetite than he satisfies. The orator is he whom every man is
seeking when he goes into the courts, into the conventions, into any
popular assembly,--though often disappointed, yet never giving over the
hope. He finds himself perhaps in the Senate, when the forest has cast
out some wild, black-browed bantling to show the same energy in the
crowd of officials which he had learned in driving cattle to the hills,
or in scrambling through thickets in a winter forest, or through the
swamp and river for his game. In the folds of his brow, in the majesty
of his mien, Nature has marked her son; and in that artificial and
perhaps unworthy place and company shall remind you of the lessons
taught him in earlier days by the torrent in the gloom of the
pine-woods, when he was the companion of the mountain cattle, of jays
and foxes, and a hunter of the bear. Or you may find him in some lowly
Bethel, by the seaside, where a hard-featured, scarred, and wrinkled
Methodist becomes the poet of the sailor and the fisherman, whilst he
pours out the abundant streams of his thought through a language all
glittering and fiery with imagination,--a man who never knew the
looking-glass or the critic,--a man whom college drill or patronage
never made, and whom praise cannot spoil,--a man who conquers his
audience by infusing his soul into them, and speaks by the right of
being the person in the assembly who has the most to say, and so makes
all other speakers appear little and cowardly before his face. For the
time, his exceeding life throws all other gifts into shade,--philosophy
speculating on its own breath, taste, learning, and all,--and yet how
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