than in any one I have known.
This soil has no succession of seasons; the sun which warms it is never
for a moment obscured by cloud or eclipse; there reigns a bright, a
genial, a perpetual summer. His perceptions are as intuitive and as
strong as those of Judge Marshall. He has as much intrepidity of
intellect as Mr. Pinkney, and great boldness; but no insolence, no
exultation of manner. He wants only ambition to make him rival, nay,
perhaps even to surpass the accomplished champion of the federal bar.
His fault is subtlety, and a provoking minuteness of detail in his
argument. He sometimes shows legal and rhetorical artifice where there
is not the least occasion for either. These defects, however, have been
acquired in the long habit of addressing subordinate tribunals, where
his genius riots in its strength, and are so little connected with the
original organization of his mind as to be easily cured.

"There is something absolutely painful in reflecting on the destiny of
this extraordinary man. Endowed with the best and most various gifts I
ever knew concur in any individual; possessing a vast fund of
information, and indefatigable in whatever he undertakes; he has a
thousand times exhibited talents equal to any occasion, and is still
unknown to the world, and, until lately, was almost unheard of beyond
the limits of his native State. One may easily reconcile to his
philanthropy that "some mute, inglorious Milton" may rest in every
neglected grove, because it requires a strong effort of imagination to
suppose the clod of the valley ever to have been "pregnant with
celestial fire;" but we have not this comfort to allay our
mortification, when we see talents of the purest and brightest ray,
united to the noblest qualities of the human heart, emitting their
lustre in broad daylight, and to the public eye, unnoticed or forgotten.
The sentiment which it excites in one is not so much sympathy with the
object as regret for the public loss in not appreciating the rarest
gifts of Providence to man. The individual himself seems too elevated to
permit a vulgar pity. The world is too contemptible in his eyes to
render its praise or its censure matter of interest. Perhaps there is
something in this public indifference even congenial to one conscious of
the inexhaustible resources and the unconquerable power of his mind. The
eagle loves the awful solitude of her sublime cliffs, which remove her
far from the importunate chattering