FIVE-MINUTE DECLAMATIONS. ELOQUENCE. DANIEL WEBSTER. THE eloquence of John Adams resembled his general character, and formed, indeed, a part of it. It was bold, manly, and energetic, and such the crisis required. 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, further than 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, in the occasion. Affected passion, intense expression, the pomp of declamation, all may aspire after it, they cannot reach it. It comes, if it comes at all, like the outbreaking of a fountain from the earth, or the bursting forth of volcanic fires, with spontaneous, original, and 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. Then, patriotism is eloquent. Then, self-devotion is eloquent. The clear conception, outrunning the 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 eloquence, it is action, noble, sublime, and godlike action. - DANIEL WEBSTER'S ELOQUENCE. RUFUS CHOATE. I BEGIN by admiring an aggregate, made up of excellences and triumphs ordinarily deemed incompatible. Webster had extraordinary power of influencing the convictions of others by speech. He spoke with consummate ability to the bench, and yet exactly as, according to every sound canon of taste and ethics, the bench ought to be addressed. He spoke with consummate ability to the jury, and yet exactly as, according to every sound canon, that totally different tribunal ought to be addressed. In the halls of Congress; before people assembled for political discussion in masses; before audiences smaller and more select, assembled for some solemn commemoration of the past or of the dead; in each of these again his speech, of the first form of ability, was exactly adapted, also, to the critical propri ELOQUENCE OF O'CONNELL. 13 eties of the place; each achieved, when delivered, the most instant and specific success of eloquence, some of them in a splendid and remarkable degree; and yet, stranger still, when reduced to writing as they fell from his lips, they compose a body of reading, in many volumes, solid, clear, rich, and full of harmony, a classical and permanent political literature. And yet, all these modes of his eloquence, exactly adapted each to its stage and its end, were stamped with his image and superscription, identified by characteristics incapable to be counterfeited, and impossible to be mistaken. The same high power of reason, intent in every one to explore and display some truth; the same sovereignty of form, of brow and eye and tone and manner, everywhere the intellectual king of men standing before you; the same marvellousness of qualities and results, residing, I know not where, in words, in pictures, in the ordering of ideas, in felicities indescribable, by means whereof, coming from his tongue, all things seemed mended; truth seemed more true; probability more plausible; greatness more grand; goodness more awful; every affection more tender, than when coming from other tongues: all these are in his eloquence, ELOQUENCE OF O'CONNELL. WENDELL PHILLIPS. BROADLY Considered, O'Connell's eloquence has never been equalled in modern times, certainly not in English speech. Do you think I am partial?" I will vouch John Randolph of Roanoke, the Virginia slaveholder, who hated an Irishman almost as much as he hated a Yankee, himself an orator of no mean level. Hearing O'Connell, he exclaimed, "This is the man, these are the lips, the most eloquent that speak the English tongue in my day!" I think he was right. I remember the solemnity of Webster, the grace of Everett, the rhetoric of Choate; I know the eloquence that lay hid in the iron logic of Calhoun; I have' melted beneath the magnetism of Sergeant S. Prentiss of Mississippi, who wielded a power few men ever had; it has been my fortune to sit at the feet of the great speakers of the English tongue on the other side of the ocean; but, I think all of them together never surpassed, and no one of them ever equalled O'Connell. Nature intended him for our Demosthenes. Never, since the great Greek, has she sent forth any one so lavishly gifted for his work as a tribune of the people. In the first place, he had a magnificent presence, impressive in bearing, massive, like that of Jupiter. Webster himself hardly outdid him, in the majesty of his proportions. To be sure, he had not Webster's craggy face, and precipice of brow, nor his eyes glowing like anthracite coal. Nor had he the lion roar of Mirabeau. But his presence filled the eye. A small O'Connell would hardly have been an O'Connell at all. These physical advantages are half the battle. I remember Russell Lowell telling us, that Mr. Webster came home from Washington at the time the Whig party thought of dissolution, and went down to Faneuil Hall to protest. Drawing himself up to his loftiest proportion, his brow clothed with thunder, before the listening thousands, he said, "Well, gentlemen, I am a Whig, a Massachusetts Whig, a Faneuil Hall Whig, a Revolutionary Whig, a Constitutional Whig; if you break the Whig party, where am I to go?" And says Lowell, "We held DEPARTURE OF THE PILGRIMS FOR HOLLAND. 15 our breath, thinking where he could go. If he had been five feet three, we should have said, 'Who cares where you go?"" So it was with O'Connell, there was something majestic in his presence before he spoke, and he added to it, what Webster had not, but Clay might have lent, grace. Lithe as a boy, at seventy, every attitude a picture, every gesture a grace, he was still all nature, nothing but nature seemed to speak all over him. He had a voice that covered the gamut. I heard him once say, 66 I send my voice across the Atlantic, careering like the thunder-storm against the breeze, to tell the slave-holder of the Carolinas that God's thunderbolts are hot, and to remind the bondman that the dawn of his redemption is already breaking." You seemed to hear the tones coming back to London from the Rocky Mountains. Then, with the slightest possible Irish brogue, he would tell a story, while all Exeter Hall shook with laughter. The next moment, tears in his voice like a Scotch song, five thousand men wept. His marvellous voice, its almost incredible power and sweetness, "Even to the verge of that vast audience it went, DEPARTURE OF THE PILGRIMS FOR DANIEL WEBSTER. THE departure of the Pilgrims for Holland is deeply interesting from its circumstances, and also as it marked the character of the times, indepen |