the oozy dungeons of
the rayless deep; the last intelligence of the crops, whose
dancing tassels will in a few months be coquetting with the
west wind on those boundless prairies, flashing along the
slimy decks of old sunken galleons, which have been rotting
for ages; messages of friendship and love, from warm, living
bosoms, burn over the cold green bones of men and women, whose
hearts, once as fond as ours, burst as the eternal gulfs
closed and roared over them, centuries ago."

Read the passage in the eulogy on Choate where he describes
him arming himself in the entire panoply of his gorgeous
rhetoric--and you will get some far-away conception of the
power of this magician.

One thing especially distinguishes our modern orator from
the writer in the closet, where he writes solely for his readers,
or where he has prepared his speeches beforehand--that is,
the influence of the audience upon him. There is nothing
like it as a stimulant to every faculty, not only imagination,
and fancy, and reason, but especially, as every experienced
speaker knows, memory also. Everything needed seems to come
out from the secret storehouses of the mind, even the things
that have lain there forgotten, rusting and unused. Mr. Everett
describes this in a masterly passage in his Life of Webster.
Gladstone states it in a few fine sentences:

"The work of the orator, from its very inception," he says,
"is inextricably mixed up with practice. It is cast in the
mould offered to him by the mind of his hearers. It is an
influence principally received from his audience (so to speak)
in vapor, which he pours back upon them in a flood. The sympathy
and concurrence of his time is, with his own mind, joint parent
of his work. He cannot follow nor frame ideals; his choice
is to be what his age would have him, what it requires in
order to be moved by him, or else not to be at all."

I heard six of Kossuth's very best speeches. He was a marvellous
orator. He seemed to have mastered the whole vocabulary of
English speech, and to have a rare gift of choosing words
that accurately expressed his meaning, and he used so to fashion
his sentences that they were melodious and delightful to the
ear. That is one great gift or oratory, as it is of poetry,
or indeed of a good prose style. Why it is that two words
or phrases which mean precisely the same thing to the intellect,
have so different an effect on the emotions, no man can tell.
To under