the late Robert Hall.

Mr. Hall is universally admitted to have possessed a mind of the first
order. He united qualities, rarely combined, each of which would have
constituted greatness; being a writer of pre-eminent excellence, and a
sacred orator that exceeded all competition.

Posterity will judge of Robert Hall's capacity by his writings alone, but
all who knew him as a preacher, unhesitatingly admit that in his pulpit
exercises (when the absorption of his mind in his subject rendered him
but half sensible to the agony of internal maladies which scarcely knew
cessation, and which would have prostrated a spirit less firm) that in
these exercises, the superiority of his intellect became more undeniably
manifest than even in his deliberate compositions. Here some might
approach, who could not surpass; but, as a preacher, he stood, collected,
in solitary grandeur.

Let the reader who was never privileged to see or hear this extraordinary
man, present to his imagination a dignified figure[12] that secured the
deference which was never exacted; a capacious forehead; an eye, in the
absence of excitement, dark, yet placid, but when warmed with argument,
flashing almost coruscations of light, as the harmonious accompaniments
of his powerful language.

But the pulpit presented a wider field for the display of this
constitutional ardour. Here, the eye, that always awed, progressively
advanced in expression; till warmed with his immortal subject it kindled
into absolute radiance, that with its piercing beams penetrated the very
heart, and so absorbed the spirit that the preacher himself was forgotten
in the magnificent and almost overpowering array of impassioned thoughts