He wrote with
elegance and force. His weak point was orthography. He would trip
sometimes in the spelling of the most common words. His explanation of
this weakness was curious: He was a printer in Mobile, Alabama. On one
occasion a thirty-two-page book-form of small type was "pied." "I
undertook,", said he, "to set that pied form to rights, and, in doing
so, the words got so mixed in my brain that my spelling was spoiled
forever!"
He went to Oregon, and traveled and preached from the Cascade Mountains
to Idaho, thrilling, melting, and amusing, in turn, the crowds that came
out to hear the wild-looking man whose coming was so sudden, and whose
going as so rapid, that they were lost in wonder, as if gazing at a
meteor that flashed across the sky.
He was a Yankee from New Hampshire, who, going to Alabama, lost his
heart, and was ever afterward intensely Southern in all his convictions
and affections. His fiery soul found congenial spirits among the
generous, hotblooded people of the Gulf States, whose very faults had a
sort of charm for this impulsive, generous, erratic, gifted, man. He
made his way back to his New England hills, where he is waiting for the
sunset, often turning a longing eye southward, and now and then sending
a greeting to Alabama.
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