One of his last sermons, when he was old and feeble, ended thus: “My work is almost done. Where are all my old shipmates—they who lay in hammocks beside me and who have fought at the same guns? Gone, gone—all gone! No, blessed be God! not _all_; there’s one left. [Here he made the picture realistic by pointing to an old salt, gray, bent, and knotty-faced.] Yes, there’s old Timberhead. He and I have weathered many a storm together. It is only a little farther we have to sail. Look, look ahead there! It is only to beat just around that point yonder. Now—now! there is the peaceful, blessful haven and home full in view.” By this time the audience was weeping, radiant with hope. Even his isolated sentences are full of this imaginary realism. “Sailors ignorant!” he cried indignantly when one depreciated them; “sailors know everything; they grasp the world in their hand like an orange!” The boldness of this language is wonderful. Of superannuated ministers he said: “They are like camels bearing precious spices and browsing on bitter herbs. They were moral giants. When God made them he rolled his sleeves up to the arm-pits.” It was the activity of his brain, the realism of his imagery and the homely naturalness of his language that made some of his transitions abrupt to grotesqueness and some of his speech border startlingly on impropriety. He really thought aloud—which many a matter-of-fact, heavy speaker would find it unsafe to do. Dissociated from their context and from the earnestness and devout spirit of the man, they sound much worse than when uttered. It was the combination of these two qualities also which made him extravagant in speech, erratic in sentiment, and inconsistent with himself. He _was_ whatever he thought or imagined for the moment; his genius possessed and controlled him. Thus he was a radical temperance reformer, but he denounced prohibitory legislation and hurled ridicule at those who proposed the use of an unfermented wine in the sacrament; he called it “raisin water.” Of rum-sellers he said: “I wonder that the angels in heaven do not tear up the golden pavements and throw them on their heads;” but he conjured those who should succeed him to “Cast out from this church, in my name, any man that comes up to the altar with his glue-pot and dye-stuff.” Dr. Jewett says: “I have heard him at times when I have been amazed at the utter inconsistency of his views, not only with any standard of doctrine recognized as sound by other men, but with his own public utterances of perhaps the week previous. His imagination, once fairly excited, could furnish in thirty minutes material for half-a-dozen speeches of an hour each; and, unfortunately, it frequently happened that different parts of the same speech could be used on opposite sides of the same question.”