shoot with greater effulgence through the air; but even the snow-clad hills of the North flash, from time to time, with the glories of the Aurora Borealis. Under the line are found more numerous volcanoes, constantly throwing up their ashes and their flames; but none of them excel in grandeur the Northern Hecla, from whose deep caverns rolls the melted lava down its ice-bound sides."

If the gifts of the impassioned son of Maine belied his birth-place, not less, in an opposite manner, did those of Carolina's child, John C. Calhoun. Born in a tropical region, where a southern sun is apt to ripen human passion into the rank luxuriance of tropical vegetation, he was as severely logical, as rigidly intellectual, as if he had been reared in Nova Zembla, or any other region above the line of perpetual snow. Dwelling amid the luxuriant life, the magnificence and pomp, the deep-toned harmonies, of the Southern zones, he was as blind to their beauties, as deaf to their melodies, as if he had really been "the cast-iron man" that he was called, and had sprung from the bowels of a granite New Hampshire mountain.

CHAPTER V.

TF

THE ORATOR'S TRIALS.

F the orator has his triumphs, which are as dazzling as any that are the reward of genius and toil, he has also, by that inexorable law of compensation which so largely equalizes human conditions, trials which are proportional to his successes. The hearer who "hangs both his greedy ears upon his lips," little dreams of the toils and mortifications the speaker has undergone. The aspirants to oratorical distinction, who envy him his fame and influence, have but a faint conception of the laborious days and sleepless nights which his successes have cost him,― of the distracting cares and interruptions, the nervous fears of failure, or of falling below himself and below public expectation, the treacheries of memory, the exhaustion and collapse of feeling, the self-dissatisfaction and selfdisgust, with which the practice of his art has been attended. Armies are not always cheering on the heights which they have won. "The statue does not come to its white limbs at once. It is the bronze wrestler, not the flesh and blood one, that stands for ever over a fallen adversary with the pride of victory on his face." It is a rare intellectual gratification to listen to a finished orator; and so it is delightful to gaze upon tapestry, and we are dazzled by the splendor of the colors, and the cunning intertexture of its purple and gold; but how many of those who

are captivated by its beauty turn the arras to see the jagged ends of thread, the shreds and rags of worsted, and the unsightly patchwork, of the reverse side of the picture, or dream of the toil it represents? Yet it is on this side that the artificer sits and works; it is at this picture that he gazes, until oftentimes the splendor he has wrought becomes distasteful, and he would fain abandon his calling for one that exacts less toil, even though it wins less admiration from the spectator.

There is hardly any public speaker of great celebrity who will not confess that he feels more or less tremor when he rises to speak, on a great occasion,- though it be for the hundredth time. To stand up before a crowded and perhaps imposing assembly, without a scrap of paper, without a chair, perhaps, to lean upon, and trusting to the fertility and readiness of your brain, to attempt a speech amid the profoundest silence, while you are the focus of a thousand eyes, and feel, as they scan or scrutinize you, that you are under the necessity of winning and holding the attention of all those listeners for an hour, or hours, is a trying task, and demands hardly less nerve and self-possession than any other critical situation in life. Those who have often assumed such a task, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, will confess that there are occasions when it is indescribably painful, and that they have no remission from either physical or mental suffering until it is performed.

But what is the cause of this anxiety and misery? Why should it be so much more difficult to address a hundred men than to address one? Why should a man who never hesitates or stammers in pouring out his thoughts to a friend or a circle of friends, be embarrassed or struck

dumb if he attempts to say the same things, however suitable, to fifty persons? Why is it that though he is awed by the presence of no one of them, and even feels himself to be intellectually superior to every individual he faces, yet collectively they inspire him with awe, if not with terror? How comes it that though he has a steady flow of ideas and words when he sits in a chair, he cannot think on his legs; that even a half-reclining posture does not check improvisation, but perpendicularity paralyzes him? Whatever may be the explanation of the phenomenon, we are all familiar with it. If we have not had personal experience of that Belshazzarish knocking of the knees, and that cleaving of the tongue to the roof of the mouth, which sometimes afflicts the public speaker in the most unexpected and mysterious manner, we have had occasion, probably, to witness painful instances of it in the experiences of others. There is hardly a more distressing position in which a human being can be placed, than that of the newly-fledged orator, who looks upon "a sea of upturned faces" for the first time, and, in a fright, forgets what he had to say. He may have repeated his speech forty times in his study, in the woods to the trees, or in his garden to the cabbages, without hesitating or omitting a word; yet the moment he mounts the rostrum and faces an audience, his intense consciousness of the human presence, of its reality, and of the impossibility of escaping it, petrifies the mind, paralyzes all his powers.

Even the most distinguished orators tell us that their first attempts at public speaking were fiery ordeals; and not a few broke down opprobriously, "throttling their practiced accents in their fears," and losing the thread of their thoughts in an access of helpless consternation.

The brightest wits have been disgraced in this way as well. as the dullest. The likelihood of such a result is, indeed, just in proportion to the speaker's oratorical gifts. Men of the finest genius and the most thorough accomplishment in other respects, often fail as public speakers from sheer excess of ideas, while a mere parrot of a fellow, with little culture and but a thimbleful of brains, "goes off" in a steady stream of words, like a rain-spout in a thunderstorm. As a crowded hall is vacated more slowly and with more difficulty than one with a small assembly, so the very multitude of the thoughts that press to the lips may impede their escape. It is well known, too, that the very delicacy of perception, the exquisite sensibility to impressions, and the impulsiveness, which are the soul of all eloquence, are almost necessarily accompanied by a certain degree of nervous tremulousness, just as a finelystrung harp vibrates at the slightest touch, or whenever the faintest breeze passes over it.

A certain amount of sensibility is, of course, absolutely indispensable to the orator, and it is, therefore, a good sign when he feels some anxiety before rising to address an assembly. The most valiant troops feel always more or less nervous at the first cannon-shot; and it is said that one of the most famous generals of the French Empire, who was called "the bravest of the brave," was always obliged to dismount from his horse at that solemn moment; after which he rushed like a lion into the fray. But while the orator must feel deeply what he has to say, his feeling must not reach that vehemence which prevents the mind from acting, which paralyzes the expression from the very fullness of the feeling. As a mill-wheel may fail to move from an excess of water as truly as