in his language,—that is, when he rises to | tated,―he tried to make soft approaches,any height of thought or of passion he comes he prayed for Harvard College, he prayed down to a language level with the ear of all for the schools, he implored the Divine his audience. It is the merit of John Brown Being "to-to-to bless to them all the boy and of Abraham Lincoln-one at Charles- that was this morning drowned in Frog town, one at Gettysburg-in the two best Pond." Now this is not want of talent or specimens of eloquence we have had in this learning, but of manliness. The doctor, no country. And observe that all poetry is doubt, shut up in his closet and his theology, written in the oldest and simplest English had lost some natural relation to men, and words. Dr. Johnson said, "There is in quick application of his thought to the course every nation a style which never becomes of events. I should add what is told of him, obsolete, a certain mode of phraseology so -that he so disliked the "sensation" preachconsonant to the analogy and principles of ing of his time that he had once prayed its respective language as to remain settled that "he might never be eloquent"; and, and unaltered. This style is to be sought it appears, his prayer was granted. On the in the common intercourse of life among other hand, it would be easy to point to those who speak only to be understood, with- many masters whose readiness is sure; as out ambition of elegance. The polite are the French say of Guizot, that "what Guizot always catching modish innovations, and the learned this morning he has the air of having learned forsake the vulgar, when the vulgar known from all eternity." This unmanliness is right; but there is a conversation above is so common a result of our half-education, grossness and below refinement, where propriety resides."

But all these are the gymnastics, the education of eloquence, and not itself. They cannot be too much considered and practised as preparation, but the powers are those I first named. If I should make the shortest list of the qualifications of the orator, I should begin with manliness; and perhaps it means here presence of mind. Men differ so much in control of their faculties! You can find in many, and indeed in all, a certain fundamental equality. Fundamentally all feel alike and think alike, and at a great heat they can all express themselves with an almost equal force. But it costs a great heat to enable a heavy man to come up with those who have a quick sensibility. Thus we have all of us known men who lose their talents, their wit, their fancy, at any sudden call. Some men, on such pressure, collapse, and cannot rally. If they are to put a thing in proper shape, fit for the occasion and the audience, their mind is a blank. Something which any boy would tell with colour and vivacity they can only stammer out with hard literalness,-say it in the very words they heard, and no other. This fault is very incident to men of study,-as if the more they had read the less they knew. Dr. Charles Chauncy was, a hundred years ago, a man of marked ability among the clergy of New England. But when once going to preach the Thursday lecture in Boston (which in those days people walked from Salem to hear), on going up the pulpit stairs he was informed that a little boy had fallen into Frog Pond on the Common, and was drowned, and the doctor was requested to improve the sad occasion. The doctor was much distressed, and in his prayer he hesi

teaching a youth Latin and metaphysics and history, and neglecting to give him the rough training of a boy,-allowing him to skulk from the games of ball and skates and coasting down the hills on his sled, and whatever else would lead him and keep him on even terms with boys, so that he can meet them as an equal, and lead in his turn,

that I wish his guardians to consider that they are thus preparing him to play a contemptible part when he is full-grown. In England they send the most delicate and protected child from his luxurious home to learn to rough it with boys in the public schools. A few bruises and scratches will do him no harm if he has thereby learned not to be afraid. It is this wise mixture of good drill in Latin grammar with good drill in cricket, boating, and wrestling, that is the boast of English education, and of high importance to the matter in hand.

Lord Ashley, in 1606, while the bill for regulating trials in cases of high treason was pending, attempting to utter a premeditated speech in Parliament in favour of that clause of the bill which allowed the prisoner the benefit of counsel, fell into such a disorder that he was not able to proceed; but, having recovered his spirits and the command of his faculties, he drew such an argument from his own confusion as more advantaged his cause than all the powers of eloquence could have done. "For," said he, "if I, who had no personal concern in the question, was so overpowered with my own apprehensions that I could not find words to express myself, what must be the case of one whose life depended on his own abilities to defend it?" This happy turn did great service in promoting that excellent bill.

These are ascending stairs,-a good voice, winning manners, plain speech, chastened, however, by the schools into correctness; but we must come to the main matter, of power of statement,-know your fact; hug your fact. For the essential thing is heat, and heat comes of sincerity. Speak what you do know and believe, and are personally in it, and are answerable for every word. Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak. He who would convince the worthy Mr. Dunderhead of any truth which Dunderhead does not see, must be a master of his art. Declamation is common; but such possession of thought as is here required, such practical chemistry as the conversion of a truth written in God's language into a truth in Dunderhead's language, is one of the most beautiful and cogent weapons that is forged in the shop of the Divine Artificer.

It was said of Robespierre's audience, that though they understood not the words, they understood a fury in the words, and caught the contagion.

This leads us to the high class, the men of character who bring an overpowering personality into court, and the cause they maintain borrows importance from an illustrious advocate. Absoluteness is required, and he must have it or simulate it. If the cause be unfashionable, he will make it fashionable. 'Tis the best man in the best training. If he does not know your fact, he will show that it is not worth the knowing. Indeed, as great generals do not fight many battles, but conquer by tactics, so all eloquence is a war of posts. What is said is the least part of the oration. It is the attitude taken, the unmistakable sign, never so casually given, in tone of voice, or manner, or word, that a greater spirit speaks from you than is spoken to in him.

Hegel, and so ending. To this we might
add the great eras not only of painters but
of orators. The historian Paterculus says of
Cicero, that only in Cicero's lifetime was any
great eloquence in Rome; so it was said
that no member of either house of the British
Parliament will be ranked among the orators
whom Lord North did not see, or who did
not see Lord North. But I should rather
say that when a great sentiment, as religion
or liberty, makes itself deeply felt in any age
or country, then great orators appear.
the Andes and Alleghanies indicate the line
of the fissure in the crust of the earth along
which they were lifted, so the great ideas
that suddenly expand at some moment the
mind of mankind indicate themselves by
orators.

As

If there ever was a country where eloquence was a power, it is in the United States. Here is room for every degree of it, on every one of its ascending stages,-that of useful speech, in our commercial, manufacturing, railroad, and educational conventions; that of political advice and persuasion on the grandest theatre, reaching, as all good men trust, into a vast future, and so compelling the best thought and noblest administrative ability that the citizen can offer. And here are the service of science, the demands of art, and the lessons of religion to be brought home to the instant practice of thirty millions of people. Is it not worth the ambition of every generous youth to train and arm his mind with all the resources of knowledge, of method, of grace, and of character, to serve such a constituency?

RESOURCES.

But I say, provided your cause is really honest. There is always the previous ques- MEN are made up of potences. We are tion: How came you on that side? Your magnets in an iron globe. We have keys to argument is ingenious, your language copious, your illustrations brilliant, but your major proposition palpably absurd. Will you establish a lie? You are a very elegant writer, but you can't write up what gravitates down. An ingenious metaphysical writer, Dr. Stirling of Edinburgh, has noted that intellectual works in any department breed each other by what he calls zymosis, i.e. fermentation; thus in the Elizabethan Age there was a dramatic zymosis, when all the genius ran in that direction, until it culminated in Shakspeare; so in Germany we have seen a metaphysical zymosis culminating in Kant, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer,

all doors. We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck; the earth sensitive as iodine to light; the most plastic and impressionable medium, alive to every touch, and, whether searched by the plough of Adam, the sword of Cæsar, the boat of Columbus, the telescope of Galileo, or the surveyor's chain of Picard, or the submarine telegraph, to every one of these experiments it makes a gracious response. I am benefited by every observation of a victory of man over nature,-by seeing that

the first observations on which our astronomy is built; millions of lives to add only sentiments and guesses, which at last, gathered in by an ear of sensibility, make the furniture of the poet. See how children build up a language; how every traveller, every labourer, every impatient boss, who sharply shortens the phrase or the word to give his order quicker, reducing it to the lowest possible terms, and there it must stay, -improves the national tongue. What power does Nature not owe to her duration of amassing infinitesimals into cosmical forces!

The marked events in history, as the emigration of a colony to a new and more delightful coast; the building of a large ship; the discovery of the mariner's compass, which perhaps the Phoenicians made; the arrival among an old stationary nation of a more instructed race, with new arts:

wisdom is better than strength; by seeing that every healthy and resolute man is an organizer, a method coming into a confusion and drawing order out of it. We are touched and cheered by every such example. We like to see the inexhaustible riches of Nature, and the access of every soul to her magazines. These examples wake an infinite hope, and call every man to emulation. A low, hopeless spirit puts out the eyes; scepticism is slow suicide. A philosophy which sees only the worst; believes neither in virtue nor in genius; which says 'tis all of no use, life is eating us up, 'tis only question who shall be last devoured,-dispirits us; the sky shuts down before us. A Schopenhauer, with logic and learning and wit, teaching pessimism, teaching that this is the worst of all possible worlds, and inferring that sleep is better than waking, and death than sleep,-all the talent in the world cannot save him from being odious. But if, instead of these nega-each of these events electrifies the tribe to tives, you give me affirmatives,-if you tell me that there is always life for the living; that what man has done man can do; that this world belongs to the energetic; that there is always a way to everything desirable; that every man is provided, in the new bias of his faculty, with a key to nature, and that man only rightly knows himself as far as he has experimented on things,-I am invigorated, put into genial and working temper; the horizon opens, and we are full of goodwill and gratitude to the Cause of Causes. I like the sentiment of the poor woman who, coming from a wretched garret in an inland manufacturing town for the first time to the sea-shore, gazing at the ocean, said "she was glad for once in her life to see something which there was enough of."

which it befalls; supples the tough barbarous sinew, and brings it into that state of sensibility which makes the transition to civilization possible and sure. By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe like Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature. Ah! what a plastic little creature he is so shifty, so adaptive! his body a Our Copernican globe is a great factory chest of tools, and he making himself comor shop of power, with its rotating constel-fortable in every climate, in every condition. lations, times, and tides. The machine is Here in America are all the wealth of soil, of colossal size; the diameter of the water- of timber, of mines, and of the sea, put into wheel, the arms of the levers, and the volley the possession of a people who wield all these of the battery, out of all mechanic measure; wonderful machines, have the secret of steam, and it takes long to understand its parts and of electricity, and have the power and habit its workings. This pump never sucks; these of invention in their brain. We Americans screws are never loose; this machine is never have got suppled into the state of melioraout of gear. The vat, the piston, the wheels tion. Life is always rapid here, but what and tires, never wear out, but are self-repair- acceleration to its pulse in ten years,-what ing. Is there any load which water cannot in the four years of the war! We have seen lift? If there be, try steam; or if not that, try the railroad and telegraph subdue our enorelectricity. Is there any exhausting of these mous geography; we have seen the snowy means? Measure by barrels the spending deserts on the northwest, seats of Esquiof the brook that runs through your field. maux, become lands of promise. When our Nothing is great but the inexhaustible wealth population, swarming west, had reached the of Nature. She shows us only surfaces, but boundary of arable land, as if to stimulate she is million fathoms deep. What spaces! our energy, on the face of the sterile waste what durations! dealing with races as merely beyond, the land was suddenly in parts preparations of somewhat to follow; or, in found covered with gold and silver, floored humanity, millions of lives of men to collect with coal. It was thought a fable, what

Guthrie, a traveller in Persia, told us, that ment, hastening to join the army, found the "in Taurida, in any piece of ground where locomotives broken, the railroad destroyed, springs of naphtha (or petroleum) obtain, and no rails. The commander called for by merely sticking an iron tube in the earth, men in the ranks who could rebuild the and applying a light to the upper end, the road. Many men stepped forward, searched mineral oil will burn till the tube is decom- in the water, found the hidden rails, laid the posed, or for a vast number of years." But track, put the disabled engine together, and we have found the Taurida in Pennsylvania continued their journey. The world belongs and Ohio. If they have not the lamp of to the energetic man. His will gives him Aladdin, they have the Aladdin oil. Re- new eyes. He sees expedients and means sources of America! why, one thinks of St. where we saw none. The invalid sits shiverSimon's saying, "The Golden Age is not ing in lamb's-wool and furs; the woodsman behind, but before you." Here is man in knows how to make warm garments out of the Garden of Eden; here the Genesis and cold and wet themselves. The Indian, the the Exodus. We have seen slavery disap- sailor, the hunter, only these know the power pear like a painted scene in a theatre; we of the hands, feet, teeth, eyes, and ears. It have seen the most healthful revolution in is out of the obstacles to be encountered that the politics of the nation,—the Constitution they make the means of destroying them. not only amended, but construed in a new The sailor by his boat and sail makes a ford spirit. We have seen China opened to out of deepest waters. The hunter, the European and American ambassadors and soldier, rolls himself in his blanket, and the commerce; the like in Japan: our arts and falling snow, which he did not have to bring productions begin to penetrate both. As in his knapsack, is his eider-down, in which the walls of a modern house are perforated he sleeps warm till the morning. Nature with water-pipes, sound-pipes, gas-pipes, herself gives the hint and the example, if we heat-pipes, so geography and geology are have wit to take it. See how Nature keeps yielding to man's convenience, and we begin the lakes warm by tucking them up under a to perforate and mould the old ball, as a blanket of ice, and the ground under a cloak carpenter does with wood. All is ductile of snow. The old forester is never far from and plastic. We are working the new At-shelter; no matter how remote from camp lantic telegraph. American energy is over- or city, he carries Bangor with him. A riding every venerable maxim of political sudden shower cannot wet him, if he cares science. America is such a garden of plenty, to be dry; he draws his boat ashore, turns such a magazine of power, that at her shores all the common rules of political economy utterly fail. Here is bread, and wealth, and power, and education for every man who has the heart to use his opportunity. The creation of power had never any parallel. It was thought that the immense production of gold would make gold cheap as pewter. But the immense expansion of trade has wanted every ounce of gold, and it has not lost its value.

it over in a twinkling against a clump of alders, with cat-briers, which keep up the lee-side, crawls under it, with his comrade, and lies there till the shower is over, happy in his stout roof. The boat is full of water, and resists all your strength to drag it ashore and empty it. The fisherman looks about him, puts a round stick of wood underneath, and rolls it as on wheels at once. Napoleon says, the Corsicans at the battle of Golo, not having had time to cut down the bridge, which was of stone, made use of the bodies of their dead to form an intrenchment. Malus, known for his discoveries in the polarization of light, was captain of a corps of engineers in Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign, which was heinously unprovided and exposed. "Wanting a picket to which to attach my horse," he says, "I tied him to my leg. I slept, and dreamed peaceably of the pleasures of Europe." M. Tissenet had learned among the Indians to understand their language, and, coming among a wild party of Illinois, he overheard them say that they would scalp him. He said to them, The whole history of our civil war is rich" Will you scalp me? Here is my scalp,' in a thousand anecdotes attesting the fertility and confounded them by lifting a little periof resource, the presence of mind, the skilled wig he wore. He then explained to them labour of our people. At Annapolis a regi- that he was a great medicine-man, and that

See how nations of customers are formed. The disgust of California has not been able to drive nor kick the Chinaman back to his home; and now it turns out that he has sent home to China American food and tools and luxuries, until he has taught his people to use them, and a new market has grown up for our commerce. The emancipation has brought a whole nation of negroes as customers to buy all the articles which once their few masters bought, and every manufacturer and producer in the North has an interest in protecting the negro as the consumer of his wares.

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