It is natural to associate the gift of eloquence with a few favored lands, and to imagine, especially, that civilized communities only have felt its influence. But there is no people, except the very lowest savages, to whom it has been denied. There is, doubtless, a vast difference between the voice of an untutored peasant, who never thought of the magic potency dwelling in this faculty, and who, consequently, addresses his fellows in loud and discordant tones, and that of the man who, with an educated mind and a cultivated taste, understands and uses his voice as Handel understood and used the organ; yet there are examples of eloquence in the speeches of Logan and Red Jacket, and other aborigines of America, that will live in the story of that abused race as long as the trees wave in their forests, or the winds sigh among their mountains. Sir Francis Head, in narrating the proceedings of a council of Red Indians which he attended as Governor of Canada, says: "Nothing can be more interesting, or offer to the civilized world a more useful lesson, than the manner in which the red aborigines of America, without ever interrupting each other, conduct their councils. The calm dignity of their demeanor, the scientific manner in which they progressively construct the framework of whatever subject they undertake to explain, the sound argument by which they connect, as well as support it, and the beautiful wildflowers of eloquence with which they adorn every portion of the moral architecture they are constructing,- form altogether an exhibition of grave interest; and yet these orators are men whose lips and gums are, while they are speaking, black from the berries on which they subsist."

As we conclude this chapter, a sad thought presses itself upon the mind touching that eloquence whose magic.

effects we have so faintly depicted; it is that it is so perishable. Of all the great products of creative art, it is the only one that does not survive the creator. We read, a discourse which is said to have enchanted all who heard it, and how "shrunken and wooden" do we find its image, compared with the conception we had formed! The orator who lashed himself into a foam,-whose speech drove on in a fiery sleet of words and images,—now

seems

"Dull as the lake that slumbers in the storm,"

and we can scarcely credit the reports of his frenzy. The picture from the great master's hand may improve with age; every year may add to the mellowness of its tints, the delicacy of its colors. The Cupid of Praxiteles, the Mercury of Thorwaldsen, are as perfect as when they came from the sculptor's chisel. The dome of Saint Peter's, the self-poised roof of King's Chapel, "scooped into ten thousand cells," the façade and sky-piercing spire of Strasbourg Cathedral, are a perpetual memorial of the genius of their builders. Even music, so far as it is a creation of the composer, may live forever. The aria or cavatina may have successive resurrections from its dead signs. The delicious melodies of Schubert, and even Handel's "seven-fold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies," may be reproduced by new artists from age to age. But oratory, in its grandest or most bewitching manifestations, the devotes of Demosthenes, contending for the crown,- the white heat of Cicero inveighing against Antony,-the glaring eye and thunder tones of Chatham denouncing the employment of Indians in war,

the winged flame of Curran blasting the pimps and informers that would rob Orr of his life, the nest of

singing-birds in Prentiss's throat, as he holds spell-bound the thousands in Faneuil Hall,- the look, port, and voice of Webster, as he hurls his thunderbolts at Hayne,- all these can no more be reproduced than the song of the sirens.

The words of a masterpiece of oratorical genius may be caught by the quick ear of the reporter, and jotted down with literal exactness, not a preposition being out of place, not an interjection wanting; but the attitude and the look, the voice and the gesture, are lost forever. As well might you attempt to paint the lightning's flash, as to paint the piercing glance which, for an instant, from the great orator's eyes, darts into your very soul, or to catch the mystic, wizard tones, which now bewitch you with their sweetness, and now storm the very citadel of your mind and senses. Occasionally a great discourse is delivered, which seems to preserve in print some of the chief elements of its power. In reading Bossuet's thrilling sermon on the death of Madame Henriette Anne d'Angleterre, we seem to be almost living in the seventeenth century, and to hear the terrible cry which rings through the halls of Versailles,-" Madame se meurt! Madame est morte!" and to see the audience sobbing with veiled faces as the words are pronounced. But, in the vast majority of cases, it is but a caput mortuum which the most cunning stenographer can give us of that which, in its utterance, so startled or charmed the hearer. The aroma, the finer essences, have vanished,— only the dead husk remains. Again, eloquence, as Pitt said, "is in the assembly," and therefore to appreciate a discourse, we must not only have heard it as delivered, but when and where it was delivered, with all its accom

66

paniments, and with the temper of those to whom it was addressed. We need the fiery life of the moment," the contagion of the great audience, the infectious enthusiasm leaping from heart to heart, the shouting thousands in the echoing minster or senate. We need to see and to hear the magician with his wand in his hand, and on the theatre of his spells. The country preacher, therefore, was right, who, when he had electrified his people by an extempore discourse preached during a thunderstorm, and was asked to let them print it, replied that he would do so if they would print the thunder-storm along with it.

CHAPTER II.

IN

IS ORATORY A LOST ART?

N the last chapter we expressed the opinion that the triumphs of eloquence in our own day, though of a different kind from those of yore, are not less signal than in the ages past. We are aware that many persons in England and America,— especially the croakers, laudatores temporis acti, and believers in the fabled "golden ages" of excellence, will deny this statement. Talk to them of the eloquent tongues of the present day,- tell them how you have been thrilled by the music of Gladstone's or Everett's periods, or startled by the thunderbolts of Webster, Brougham, or Bright,—and they will tell you, with a sigh, that the oratory of their predecessors was grander and more impressive. The golden age of oratory, they say, has gone, and the age of iron has succeeded. It is an era of tare and tret, of buying and selling, of quick returns and small profits, and we have no time or taste for fine phrases. If we have perfected the steam-engine, and invented the electric telegraph and the phonograph, we have also enthroned a sordid, crouching, mammon-worshipping spirit in high places; we have deified dullness, and idolized cotton-spinning and knife-grinding, till oratory, which always mirrors the age, has become timid and formal, dull and decorous, never daring or caring to soar in eagle flights, but content to creep on the ground, and "dwell in decencies forever." Hence we have no masterpieces of