returned an accomplished scholar from Germany, graced with a delicacy
of culture hitherto unknown to our schools; how the youthful professor
of Greek at Harvard, transferred to the pulpit of Brattle Street, in
Boston, held men and women in thrall by the splendor of his rhetoric
and the pleading music of his voice, drawing the young scholars after
him, who are now our chief glory and pride; how his Phi Beta Kappa
oration in 1824 and its apostrophe to Lafayette, who was present, is
still the fond tradition of those who heard it; and how as he passed
on from triumph to triumph in his art of oratory, the elegance, the
skill, the floridity, the elaboration, the unfailing fitness and
severe propriety of his art, with all its minor gifts, consoled Boston
that it was not Athens or Rome, and had not heard Demosthenes or
Cicero.

If you ventured curiously to question this fond recollection, to ask
whether the eloquence was of the heart and soul, or of the mind and
lips; whether it were impassioned oratory, burning, resistless, such
as we suppose Demosthenes and Patrick Henry poured out; or whether it
were polished and skilful declamation--those old listeners were like
lovers. They did not know; they did not care. They remembered the
magic tone, the witchery of grace, the exuberant rhetoric; they
recalled the crowds clustering at his feet, the gusts of emotion that
in the church swept over the pews, the thrills of delight that in the
hall shook the audience; their own youth was part of it; they saw
their own bloom in the flower they remembered, and they could not
criticise or compare.

All this recollection flashed through the mind of the Easy Chair
before the orator had well opened his lips. The tradition was
overpowering. It was not fair, but it was inevitable. If we could see