He works his miracles with it, as Hermes did, his voice conducting; the sense alike to eye and ear by its lyrical movement and refraining melody. So his compositions affect us, not as logic linked in syllogisms, but as voluntaries rather, or preludes, in which one is not tied to any design of air, but may vary his key or note at pleasure, as if improvised without any particular scope of argument; each period, each paragraph, being a perfect note in itself, however it may chance chime with its accompaniments in the piece; as a waltz of wandering stars, a dance of Hesperus with Orion. His rhetoric dazzles by circuits, contrasts, antitheses; Imagination, as in all sprightly minds, being his wand of power. He comes along his own paths, too, and always in his own fashion. What though he build his piers downwards from the firmament to the tumbling tides, and so throw his radiant span across the fissures of his argument, and himself pass over the frolic arches,—Ariel-wise,—is the skill less admirable, the masonry less secure for its singularity? So his books are best read as irregular writings, in which the sentiment is, by his enthusiasm, transfused throughout the piece, telling on the mind in cadences of a current under-song, and giving the impression of a connected whole—which it seldom is,—such is the rhapsodist’s cunning in its structure and delivery. The highest compliment we can pay to the scholar is that of having edified and instructed us, we know not how, unless by the pleasure his words have given us. Conceive how much the Lyceum owes to his presence and teachings; how great the debt of many to him for their hour’s entertainment. His, if any one’s, let the institution pass into history,—since his art, more than another’s, has clothed it with beauty, and made it the place of popular resort, our purest organ of intellectual entertainment for New England and the Western cities. And, besides this, its immediate value to his auditors everywhere, it has been serviceable in ways they least suspect; most of his works, having had their first readings on its platform, were here fashioned and polished in good part, like Plutarch’s Morals, to become the more acceptable to readers of his published books. And is not the omen auspicious, that just now, during these winter evenings, at the opening of this victorious year, _his_ Sundays have come round again; the metropolis, eager, as of old, to hear his words. Does it matter what topic he touches? He adorns all with a severe sententious beauty, a freshness and sanction next to that of godliness, if not that in spirit and effect. “The princely mind, that can Teach man to keep a God in man; And when wise poets would search out to see Good men, behold them all in thee.”