To be a perfect and consummate orator is to possess the highest
faculty given to man. He must be a great artist, and more.
He must be a great actor, and more. He must be a master of
the great things that interest mankind. What he says ought
to have as permanent a place in literature as the highest
poetry. He must be able to play at will on the mighty organ,
his audience, of which human souls are the keys. He must
have knowledge, wit, wisdom, fancy, imagination, courage,
nobleness, sincerity, grace, a heart of fire. He must himself
respond to every emotion as an AEolian harp to the breeze.
He must have

An eye that tears can on a sudden fill
And lips that smile before the tears are gone.

He must have a noble personal presence. He must have, in
perfection, the eye and the voice which are the only and
natural avenues by which one human soul can enter into and
subdue another. His speech must be filled with music, and
possess its miraculous charm and spell,

Which the posting winds recall,
And suspend the river's fall.

He must have the quality which Burke manifested when Warren
Hastings said, "I felt, as I listened to him, as if I were
the most culpable being on earth"; and which made Philip say
of Demosthenes, "Had I been there he would have persuaded
me to take up arms against myself."

He has a present, practical purpose to accomplish. If he
fail in that he fails utterly and altogether. His object is to
convince the understanding, to persuade the will, to set
aflame the heart of his audience or those who read what he
says. He speaks for a present occasion. Eloquence is the
feather that tips his arrow. If he miss the mark he is a
failure, although his sentences may survive everything else
in the permanent literature of the language in which he speaks.
What he says must not only accomplish the purpose of the hour,
but should be fit to be preserved for all time, or he can
have no place in literature, and a small and ephemeral place
in human memory.

The orator must know how so to utter his thought that it
will stay. The poet and the orator have this in common.
Each must so express and clothe his thought that it shall
penetrate and take possession of the soul, and, having penetrated,
must abide and stay. How this is done, who can tell? Carlyle
defines poetry as a "sort of lilt." Cicero finds the secret
of eloquence in a

Lepos quidem celeritasque et brevitas.

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