His imagination might have made him a poet, his human sympathies a dramatic poet, had not his strong common-sense kept him always in touch with the actualities of life, and a masterful conscience compelled him to use his æsthetic faculties in sterner service than in the entertainment of mankind. The intensity of his moral nature enhanced rather than subdued his exuberant humor, which love prevented from becoming satire, and seriousness preserved from degenerating into wit. His native faculty of mimicry led men to call him an actor, yet he wholly lacked the essential quality of a good actor,--power to take on another's character,--and used the mimic art only to interpret the truth which at the moment possessed him. Such power of passion as was his is not often seen mated to such self-control; for while he spoke with utter abandon, he rarely if ever did so until he had carefully deliberated the cause he was espousing. He thought himself deficient in memory, and in fact rarely borrowed illustrations from his reading either of history or of literature; but his keenness of observation photographed living scenes upon an unfading memory which years after he could and did produce at will. All these contrary elements of his strangely composite though not incongruous character entered into his style,--or, to speak more accurately, his styles,--and make any analysis of them within reasonable limits difficult, if not impossible. For the writer is known by his style as the wearer by his clothes. Even if it be no native product of the author's mind, but a conscious imitation of carefully studied models,--what I may call a tailor-made style, fashioned in a vain endeavor to impart sublimity to commonplace thinking,--the poverty of the author is thereby revealed, much as the boor is most clearly disclosed when wearing ill-at-ease, unaccustomed broadcloth. Mr. Beecher's style was not artificial; its faults as well as its excellences were those of extreme naturalness. He always wrote with fury; rarely did he correct with phlegm. His sermons were published as they fell from his lips,--correct and revise he would not. The too few editorials which he wrote, on the eve of the Civil War, were written while the press was impatiently waiting for them, were often taken page by page from his hand, and were habitually left unread by him to be corrected in proof by others. [Illustration: HENRY WARD BEECHER.]