The morning discourse was a luminous and
generous appreciation of the great reformer's character and work. This
was read in that rapid, vehement, incessant manner which description has
made sufficiently familiar to the public. The precipitation of utterance
is like the flowing forth of the liquid contents of a bottle suddenly
inverted; every word seems hurrying to be foremost. The unaccustomed
hearer is at first left hopelessly in the rear; but presently the
contagion of the speaker's rushing thought reaches him, and he is drawn
into the wake of that urgent ongoing; he is towed along in the great
multitudinous convoy that follows the mighty motor-vessel, steaming,
unconscious of the weight it bears, across the sea of thought. The
energy is sufficient for all; it overflows so amply that you scarcely
feel it not to be your own energy. The writing is like in character to
the speaking--continuous, no break, no shock, no rest, not much change
of swifter and slower till the end. The apparent mass of the speaker,
physical and mental, might at first seem equal to making up a full,
adequate momentum without multiplication by such a component of
velocity; but by-and-by you come to feel that the motion is a necessary
part of the power. I am told, indeed, that a constitutional tendency to
hesitation in utterance is the speaker's real reason for this indulged
precipitancy of speech. Not unlikely; but the final result of habit is
as if of nature.
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