ELOQUENCE.


1. When public bodies are to be addressed on momentous occasions, when
great interests are at stake, and strong passions excited, nothing is
valuable in speech farther than as it is connected with high intellectual
and moral endowments. Clearness, force, and earnestness are the qualities
which produce conviction. True eloquence, indeed, does not consist in
speech. It cannot be brought from far. Labor and learning may toil for it,
but they will toil in vain. Words and phrases may be marshalled in every
way, but they cannot compass it. It must exist in the man, in the subject,
and in the occasion.

2. Affected passion, intense expression, the pomp of declamation, all may
aspire to it; they cannot reach it. It comes, if it come at all, like the
outbreaking of volcanic fires, with spontaneous, original, native force.
The graces taught in the schools, the costly ornaments and studied
contrivances of speech, shock and disgust men, when their own lives, and
the fate of their wives, their children, and their country, hang on the
decision of the hour. Then words have lost their power, rhetoric is vain,
and all elaborate oratory contemptible. Even genius itself then feels
rebuked and subdued, as in the presence of higher qualities.

3. Then patriotism is eloquent; then self-devotion is eloquent. The clear
conception, outrunning deductions of logic, the high purpose, the firm
resolve, the dauntless spirit, speaking on the tongue, beaming from the
eye, informing every feature, and urging the whole man onward, right
onward to his object,--this, this is eloquence; or rather it is something
greater and higher than all eloquence,--it is action, noble, sublime,
god-like action.