Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 9.djvu/165

RUFUS CHOATE yx)XL — ^that same marvelousness 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 — these are, in all, his eloquence. But sometimes it became individualized and discriminated even from itself; sometimes place and circumstances, great interests at stake, a stage, an audience fitted for the highest historic action, a crisis, personal or national, upon him, stirred the depths of that emotional nature, as the anger of the goddess stirs the sea on which the great epic is beginning; strong passions, themselves kindled to intensity, quickened every faculty to a new life ; the stimulated associations of ideas brought all treasures of thought and knowledge within command; the spell, which of- ten held his imagination fast, dissolved, and she arose and gave him to choose of her urn of gold ; earnestness became vehemence, the simple, per- spicuous, measured, and direct language became a headlong, full, and burning tide of speech ; the discourse of reason, wisdom, gravity, and beauty, changed to that superhuman, that rarest con- summate eloquence — grand, rapid, pathetic, ter- rible; the aliquid immensum infinitumque that Cicero might have recognized; the master tri- 155