joys were about to descend upon these trembling souls, like tongues of fire on the day of Pentecost. At other times, heads bowed down with humiliation, or pale upturned faces and streaming eyes, lips parted with broken ejaculations of despair, silently testified that the spirit of repentance had breathed on many a hardened heart.

There is a story told of a French Abbé, that he preached a sermon, on a certain Sunday, of such power that his appalled people went home, put up the shutters of their shops, and for three days gave themselves up to utter despair. Jonathan Edwards, the Calvinistic divine, preached sermons of such force that, under the lash of his fiery denunciation, men cried out in agony, and women rose up in their seats. There have been other preachers who, in moments of general misery, have had equal power of turning the wailing of their people into bursts of thankfulness and joy. "I have. heard it reported," says Emerson, "of an eloquent preacher whose voice is not forgotten in this city (Boston), that, on occasions of death or tragic disaster which overspread the congregation with gloom, he ascended the pulpit with more than his usual alacrity, and, turning to his favorite lessons of devout and jubilant thankfulness, Let us praise the Lord,'-carried audience, mourners, and mourning along with him, and swept away all the impertinence of private sorrow with his hosannas and songs of praise."

In our own day the triumphs of eloquence, though of a different kind from those of yore, are hardly less signal than in the ages past. We doubt, on the whole, if the orator was ever tempted by brighter laurels, or had a grander field for the exercise of his art. We live in an age of popular agitation, when, in every free country, the

people are becoming more and more the source of all power, and when it is by organized and systematic effort,by "monster meetings," and appeals made to the constituencies of the country, rather than to the legislature,that great political changes are worked out. The germs of great events, the first motive-springs of change, have their origin, no doubt, in the closet, in the brains of men of deep thought and wide observation, who are not engaged in the strife and turmoil of the arena. But the people are the great agency by which all revolutions and changes. are accomplished, and the two great engines for convincing and moving the people are oratory and the press. Never before were the masses of the people appealed to so earnestly and systematically as now. The title, "Agitator," once a term of contempt, has now become one of honor. Look at England! What mighty changes have been wrought in her political system within the last fifty years by the indomitable energy of the Vincents, the Foxes, the Cobdens, and scores of other speakers, who have traversed the kingdom, advocating Parliamentary Reform, the Repeal of the Corn-Laws, and other measures which were once deemed utopian and hopeless! Scotland, too, has hardly yet recovered from a convulsion which shook society to its. foundations, produced by the eloquence of a few earnest men, who declared that "conscience should be free." Who can doubt that, in our own country, it was the vehement and impassioned oratory of the so-called "anti-slavery fanatics,”—the "hare-brained" champions of "the higher law," that precipitated the "irrepressible conflict" which broke the fetters of the slave, and thus removed the most formidable obstacle to the complete union of North and South, as well as the foulest stain on our escutcheon?

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