How widely different are these men from Bacon, Kant, or Fichte,--or, to compare them more directly with the artists of literature, by what chasms of space are they removed from Milton, Shakspeare, and even from Homer, who, although he was a _realist_, yet had eagles' wings, and was at home on the earth and in the clouds, amongst heroes, amongst the light-footed nymphs, and amongst the Olympian gods! In these latter the movement of imagination is _centrifugal_, it sustains itself in the loftiest altitudes, and in the most evanescent and fleecy shapes of thought it finds the materials from which it wreathes its climbing, "cloud-capped" citadels. The opposite order of genius is, as we have previously called it, _centripetal_, gravitating earthward. Both orders are to be found among those celebrated as pulpit orators,--all, indeed, who have ranked as powers in this department of human effort belonging eminently, nay, we may almost say _exclusively_, to one or the other. If we take Spurgeon, Whitefield, Bunyan, and Luther as representatives of one order, we shall have also representatives of the other in such orators as Jeremy Taylor,--the Shakspeare of the pulpit,--and, though in a very different sort, Henry Ward Beecher. That in which these two classes of orators differ is mainly the plane of their movements,--the one hardly lifted above the earth's surface or above the level of sensibility, while the other rises into the sphere of the ideal and impalpable. In the latter class there are vast differences, but uniformly intellect is prominent above sensibility; human faith and love are _exhalant_, aspirant, and rendered of a vapory subtilty by the interpenetration with them of the Olympian sunlight of thought and imagination. In Beecher this ideality is of a _philosophic_ sort. Thought in him is forever dividing and illustrating truth; and that which is his great peculiarity is that he is at the same time so strictly philosophical, even to a metaphysical nicety, and so very popular. We have heard him, in a single discourse, give utterance to so much philosophic truth relating to theology, as, if it were spread out over a dozen sermons by doctors in divinity whom we have also heard, would be capital sufficient to secure a professor's chair in any theological seminary in the country. Yet he is never abundant in analytic statements of truth: these in any one of his sermons are "few"--as they should be--"and far between": the greater portion of his time and the most mighty efforts of his dramatic power being devoted to the irradiation and illustration of these truths. This is the fertility of his genius, that, out of the roots which philosophy furnishes, it can, through its mysterious broodings, bring forth into the breathing warmth of life organisms so delicate and perfect. Here is the secret of his popularity. Jeremy Taylor, without being at all metaphysical, without ever diving down to examine the