of the woodman's axe is heard long after the
stroke is seen, as the light of the star shines upon us many days after
its departure from the source of radiance.

Mr. Beecher made a single speech in Great Britain, but it was delivered
piecemeal in different places. Its exordium was uttered on the ninth of
October at Manchester, and its peroration was pronounced on the
twentieth of the same month in Exeter Hall. He has himself furnished us
an analysis of the train of representations and arguments of which this
protracted and many-jointed oration was made up. At Manchester he
attempted to give a history of that series of political movements,
extending through half a century, the logical and inevitable end of
which was open conflict between the two opposing forces of Freedom and
Slavery. At Glasgow his discourse seems to have been almost
unpremeditated. A meeting of one or two Temperance advocates, who had
come to greet him as a brother in their cause, took on, "quite
accidentally," a political character, and Mr. Beecher gratified the
assembly with an address which really looks as if it had been in great
measure called forth by the pressure of the moment. It seems more like a
conversation than a set harangue. First, he very good-humoredly defines
his position on the Temperance question, and then naturally slides into
some self-revelations, which we who know him accept as the simple
expression of the man's character. This plain speaking made him at home
among strangers more immediately, perhaps, than anything else he could
have told them. "I am born without moral fear. I have expressed my views
in any audience, and it never cost me a struggle. I never could help
doing it."

The way a man handles his egoisms is a test of his mastery over an
audience or a class of readers. What we want to know about the person
who is to counsel or lead us is just what he is, and nobody can tell us
so well as himself. Every real master of speaking or writing uses his
personality as he would any other serviceable material; the very moment
a speaker or writer begins to use it, not for his main purpose, but for
vanity's sake, as all weak people are sure to do, hearers and readers
feel the difference in a moment. Mr. Beecher is a strong, healthy man,
in mind and body. His nerves have never been corrugated with alcohol;
his thinking-marrow is not brown with tobacco-fumes, like a meerschaum,
as are the brains of so many unfortunate Americans; he is t