the war-whoop shall wake the sleep of the cradle,”—the prophecy seemed for a moment a reality. "I shuddered and looked a little behind me; for I fancied a big Indian with an uplifted tomahawk over me."

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William Wirt, himself an orator, tells us that when the Blind Preacher of Virginia" drew a picture of the trial, crucifixion, and death of our Savior, there was such force and pathos in the description that the original scene. appeared to be, at that moment, acting before the hearers' eyes. "We saw the very faces of the Jews: the staring, frightful distortions of malice and rage. We saw the buffet; my soul kindled with a flame of indignation; and - my hands were involuntarily and convulsively clinched.” But when, with faltering voice, he came to touch on the patience, the forgiving meekness of the Savior, his prayer for pardon of his enemies, "the effect was inconceivable. The whole house resounded with the mingled groans, and sobs, and shrieks of the congregation."

The accounts given of the effects wrought by some of Daniel Webster's speeches, seem almost incredible to those who never have listened to his clarion-like voice and weighty words. Yet even now, as we read some of the stirring passages in his early discourses, we can hardly realize that we are not standing by as he strangles the reluctantes dracones of an adversary, or actually looking upon the scenes in American history which he so vividly describes. Prof. Ticknor, speaking in one of his letters of the intense excitement with which he listened to Webster's Plymouth Address, says: "Three or four times I thought my temples would burst with the gush of blood; for, after all, you must know that I am aware it is no connected and compacted whole, but a collection of won

derful fragments of burning eloquence, to which his manner gave tenfold force. When I came out, I was almost afraid to come-near to him. It seemed to me that he was like the mount that might not be touched, and that burned with fire."

As it was the eloquence of Hamilton, spoken and written, which, in no small degree, established our political system, so it was the eloquence of Webster that mainly defended and saved it:

"Duo fulmina belli, Scipiadas, cladem Libya."

When the Federal Constitution, the product of so much sacrifice and toil, was menaced by the Nullifiers of South Carolina, it was the great orator of Massachusetts that sprang to its rescue. As the champion of New England closed the memorable peroration of his reply to Hayne, the silence of death rested upon the crowded Senate Chamber. Hands remained clasped, faces fixed and rigid, and eyes tearful, while the sharp rap of the President's hammer could hardly awaken the audience from the trance into which the orator had thrown them. When, again, over thirty years later, Nullification once more raised its front, and stood forth armed for a long and desperate conflict, it was the ignited logic of the same Defender of the Constitution, the burning and enthusiastic appeals for "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable," which, still echoing in the memories of the people, roused them as by a bugle-blast. to resistance. It was because Webster, when living, had indoctrinated the whole North with his views of the structure of our government, that, when his bones lay mouldering at Marshfield, the whole North was ready to

fight as one man against the heresy of Secession. The idol of the American youth, at the stage of their culture when eloquence exerts its most powerful fascination, he had infused into their hearts such a sentiment of nationality, that they sprang to arms with a determination to shed the last drop of their blood, rather than see a single star effaced from the ample folds of the national flag. Who has forgotten the potent enchantment worked by the same voice in Faneuil Hall, after the odious Compromise Act of 1850? The orator who had been adored as "godlike," and whose appearance had been a signal for a universal outburst of enthusiasm,the orator upon

whom New England had been proud to lavish its honors, was now received with frowning looks and sullen indignation; yet "never," says the poet Lowell, "“did we encounter a harder task than to escape the fascination of that magnetic presence of the man, which worked so potently to charm the mind from a judicial serenity to an admiring enthusiasm. There he stood, the lion at bay; and that one man, with his ponderous forehead, his sharp, cliff-edged brows, his brooding, thunderous eyes, his Mirabeau mane of hair, and all the other nameless attributes of his lion-like port, seemed enough to overbalance and outweigh that great multitude of men, who came as accusers, but remained, so to speak, as captives, swayed to and fro by his aroused energy as the facile grain is turned hither and thither in mimic surges by the strong wind that runs before the thundergust."

With the triumphs of sacred oratory it would be easy to fill a volume. Not to go back to the days of John the Baptist, or to those of Paul and Peter, whose words are the very flame-breath of the Almighty,- nor even to

the days of Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed, who, when, like another Elijah, or John the Baptist risen from the dead, he reappeared among his townsmen of Antioch, after the austerities in the desert to which his disgust at their licentiousness had driven him, denounced their bacchanalian orgies in words that made their cheeks tingle. and sent them panic-stricken to their homes, who is not familiar with the miracles which christian eloquence has wrought in modern times? Who has forgotten the story of "the priest, patriot, martyr," Savonarola, crying evermore to the people of Florence, "Heu! fuge crudelas terras, fuge littus avarum!" Who is ignorant of the mighty changes, ecclesiastic and political, produced by the blunt words of Latimer, the fiery appeals of Wycliffe, the stern denunciations of Knox? Or what ruler of men ever subjugated them more effectually by his sceptre than Chalmers, who gave law from his pulpit for thirty years; who hushed the frivolity of the modern Babylon, and melted the souls of the French philosophers in a half-known tongue; who drew tears from dukes and duchesses, and made princes of the blood and bishops start to their feet, and break out into rounds of the wildest applause?

What cultivated man needs to be told of the sweet persuasion that dwelt upon the tongue of the swan of Cambray, the alternating religious joy and terror inspired by the silvery cadence and polished phrase of · Massillon, or the resistless conviction that followed the argumentative strategy of Bourdaloue, a mode of attack upon error and sin which was so illustrative of the imperatoria virtus of Quintilian, that the great Condé cried out once, as the Jesuit mounted the pulpit, "Silence, Messieurs, voici l'ennemi!" What schoolboy is not familiar with the

religious terror with which, in his oraisons funèbres, the "Demosthenes of the pulpit," Bossuet, thrilled the breasts of seigneurs and princesses, and even the breast of that King before whom other kings trembled and knelt, when, taking for his text the words, "Be wise, therefore, O ye kings! be instructed, ye judges of the earth!" he unveiled to his auditors the awful reality of God the Lord of all empires, the chastiser of princes, reigning above the heavens, making and unmaking kingdoms, principalities and powers; or, again, with the fire of a lyric poet and the zeal of a prophet, called on nations, princes, nobles, and warriors, to come to the foot of the catafalque which strove to raise to heaven a magnificent testimony of the nothingness of man? At the beginning of his discourses, the action of "the eagle of Meaux," we are told, was dignified and reserved; he confined himself to the notes before him. Gradually "he warmed with his theme, the contagion of his enthusiasm seized his hearers; he watched their rising emotion; the rooted glances of a thousand eyes filled him with a sort of divine frenzy; his notes became a burden and a hindrance; with impetuous ardor he abandoned himself to the inspiration of the moment; with the eyes of the soul he watched the swelling hearts of his hearers; their concentrated emotions became his own; he felt within himself the collected might of the orators and martyrs whose collected essence, by long and repeated communion, he had absorbed into himself; from flight to flight he ascended, until, with unflagging energy, he towered straight upwards, and dragged the rapt contemplation of his audience along with him in its ethereal flight." At such times, says the Abbé Le Dieu, it seemed as though the heavens were open, and celestial