ou
and I will break, if you don't give me this permission." And they
signed. So the meeting glided from the Graham Institute to this house. A
great audience assembled. We had detectives in disguise, and every
arrangement made to handle the subject in a practical form if the crowd
should undertake to molest us. The Rev. Dr. R.S. Storrs consented to
come and pray, for Mr. Wendell Phillips was by marriage a near and
intimate friend and relation of his. The reporters were here; when were
they ever not?

Mr. Phillips began his lecture, and, you may depend upon it, by this
time the lion was in him, and he went careering on. Hie views were
extreme; he made them extravagant. I remember at one point--for he was a
man without bluster, serene, self-poised, never disturbed in the
least--he made an affirmation that was very bitter, and the cry arose
over the whole congregation. He stood still, with a cold, bitter smile
in his eye, and waited till they subsided, when he repeated it with more
emphasis. Again the roar went through. He waited and repeated it, if
possible, more intensely, and he beat them down with that one sentence
until they were still, and let him go on.

POWER TO DISCERN THE RIGHT.

The power to discern right amid all the wrappings of interest and all
the seductions of ambition was singularly his. To choose the lowly for
their sake, to abandon all favor, all power, all comfort, all ambition,
all greatness--that was his genius and glory. He confronted the spirit
of the nation and of the age. I had almost said he set himself against
nature, as if he had been a decree of God over-riding all these other
insuperable obstacles. That was his function. Mr. Phillips was not
called to be a universal orator any more than he was a universal
thinker. In literature and in history widely read, in person
magnificent, in manners most accomplished, gentle as a babe, sweet as a
new-blown rose, in voice clear and silvery, yet he was not a man of
tempests, he was not an orchestra of a hundred instruments, he was not
an organ, mighty and complex. The nation slept, and God wanted a
trumpet, sharp, wide-sounding, narrow and intense; and that was Mr.
Phillips. The long-roll is not particularly agreeable in music, or in
times of war, but it is better than flutes or harps when men are in a
great battle, or are on the point of it. His eloquence was penetrating
and alarming. He did not flow as a mighty Gulf Stream; he did not dash
upon t