e; and yet, stranger still, when reduced to
writing, as they fell from his lips, they compose a body of reading in
many volumes--solid, clear, rich, and full of harmony--a classical and
permanent political literature.

And yet all these modes of his eloquence, exactly adapted each to its
stage and its end, were stamped with his image and superscription,
identified by characteristics incapable to be counterfeited and
impossible to be mistaken. The same high power of reason, intent in
every one to explore and display some truth; some truth of judicial, or
historical, or biographical fact; some truth of law, deduced by
construction, perhaps, or by illation; some truth of policy, for want
whereof a nation, generations, may be the worse--reason seeking and
unfolding truth; the same tone, in all, of deep earnestness, expressive
of strong desire that what he felt to be important should be accepted as
true, and spring up to action; the same transparent, plain, forcible,
and direct speech, conveying his exact thought to the mind--not
something less or more; the same sovereignty of form, of brow, and eye,
and tone, and manner--everywhere the intellectual king of men, standing
before you--that same marvelousness of qualities and results, residing,
I know not where, in words, in pictures, in the ordering of ideas,
infelicities indescribable, by means whereof, coming from his tongue,
all things seemed mended--truth seemed more true, probability more
plausible, greatness more grand, goodness more awful, every affection
more tender than when coming from other tongues--these are, in all, his
eloquence.

But sometimes it became individualized and discriminated even from
itself; sometimes place and circumstances, great interests at stake, a
stage, an audience fitted for the highest historic action, a crisis,
personal or national, upon him, stirred the depths of that emotional
nature, as the anger of the goddess stirs the sea on which the great
epic is beginning; strong passions themselves kindled to intensity,
quickened every faculty to a new life; the stimulated associations of
ideas brought all treasures of thought and knowledge within command; the
spell, which often held his imagination fast, dissolved, and she arose
and gave him to choose of her urn of gold; earnestness became vehemence,
the simple, perspicuous, measured and direct language became a headlong,
full, and burning tide of speech; the discourse of reason, wisdom,
gravit