But, whether homely or lofty, whether pathetic or witty, he always talked in dead earnest out of his warm heart, out of his seething brain, and everything was gilded by the magic touch of imagination. “A man,” says Stevens, “who could scarcely speak three sentences, in the pulpit or out of it, without presenting a striking poetic image, a phrase of rare beauty, or a sententious sarcasm, whose discourses presented the strangest, the most brilliant exhibition of sense, epigrammatic thought, pathos, and humor, spangled over by an exhaustless variety of the finest images and pervaded by a spiritual earnestness that subdued all listeners.” “His splendid thoughts come faster than he can speak them,” said Harriet Martineau, “and at times he could be totally overwhelmed by them if a burst of tears, of which he was wholly unconscious, did not aid in his relief.” “I have seen a diamond shining,” said Dr. Bartol, “but he was a diamond on fire.” 3. _Sympathy._ Here was the secret of his power over men. His emotional nature constantly overflowed all else. With a marvelous intuition in reading character, a free-masonry with all phases of human emotions, a magnetism that put him inside of every heart, he became the better self, the ideal longing of each listener. It made no difference how learned or stoical the man was; Father Taylor got hold of him and stirred his heart from the bottom. A man of wit said, “I am always afraid when I am laughing at Father Taylor’s wit, for I know he will make me cry before he has done with me.” People cry and laugh alternately, and sometimes both together. Laughter is the best preparation for tears. “Man, thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear.” [Are we not all inconsistent, eccentric, at the bottom of our natures, _i. e._, at our very best?] A New York comedian came to study the method of one of whose acting he had heard much report; he was so affected by the unlearned art of this master of the soul that he fairly blubbered behind his handkerchief. Dr. Wentworth, of another occasion said: “The immense audience swayed in the wealth of his eloquence like a forest of willows. We laughed, we wept, we shouted in turns; and finally, finding myself getting utterly unmanned, and rapidly dissolving into tears and brine, I fled the pulpit and hid myself out of earshot of this extraordinary scene.” Dr. Wakely, of New York, describes the effects of a prayer by Father Taylor, at the New York Conference: “The ministers wept all over the house like little children. Dr. Capers and Dr. Pitman were in the pulpit with me. Dr. Capers wept and trembled exceedingly; and Dr. Pitman laughed and cried alternately—smiles and tears strangely blended.” “His pathos is the most awful of his powers,” said Miss Martineau, terrified at his control over her emotions; “I have seen a single clause of a short sentence call up an instantaneous flush on hundreds of hard faces.”