with the vain wish that he could have replied to it,--and altogether a very
miserable subject, and in as unfavorable a condition to accept comfort from
a wife and children as poor Christian in the first three pages of the
"Pilgrim's Progress." With a superhuman effort he opens his book, and in
the twinkling of an eye he is looking into the full "orb of Homeric or
Miltonic song;" or he stands in the crowd--breathless, yet swayed as
forests or the sea by winds--hearing and to judge the pleadings for the
crown; or the philosophy which soothed Cicero or Boethius in their
afflictions, in exile, prison, and the contemplation of death, breathes
over his petty cares like the sweet south; or Pope or Horace laughs him
into good humor; or he walks with Aneas and the Sibyl in the mild light of
the world of the laurelled dead; and the court-house is as completely
forgotten as the dreams of a pre-adamite life. Well may he prize that
endeared charm, so effectual and safe, without which the brain had long ago
been chilled by paralysis, or set on fire of insanity!
R. Choate.


XXI.

ELOQUENCE OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

Men heard that eloquence in 1776, in that manifold and mighty appeal by the
genius and wisdom of that new America, to persuade the people to take on
the name of nation, and begin its life. By how many pens and tongues that
great pleading was conducted; through how many months before the date of
the actual Declaration, it went on, day after day; in how many forms,
before how many assemblies, from the village newspaper, the more careful
pamphlet, the private conversation, the town-meeting, the legislative
bodies of particular colonies, up to the hall of the immortal old Congress,