The highest platform of eloquence is the moral sentiment.  It is what is called affirmative truth, and has the property of invigorating the hearer; and it conveys a hint of our eternity, when he feels himself addressed on grounds which will remain when everything else is taken, and which have no trace of time or place or party.  Everything hostile is stricken down in the presence of the sentiments; their majesty is felt by the most obdurate.  It is observable, that, as soon as one acts for large masses, the moral element will and must be allowed for, will and must work; and the men least accustomed to appeal to these sentiments invariably recall them when they address nations.  Napoleon, even, must accept and use it as he can.

It is only to these simple strokes that the highest power belongs, when a weak human hand touches, point by point, the eternal beams and rafters on which the whole structure of Nature and society is laid.  In this tossing sea of delusion, we feel with our feet the adamant; in this dominion of chance, we find a principle of permanence.  For I do not accept that definition of Isocrates, that the office of his art is to make the great small and the small great; but I esteem this to be its perfection,—­when the orator sees through all masks to the eternal scale of truth, in such sort that he can hold up before the eyes of men the fact of today steadily to that standard, thereby making the great great and the small small,—­which is the true way to astonish and to reform mankind.

All the first orators of the world have been grave men, relying on this reality.  One thought the philosophers of Demosthenes’s own time found running through all his orations,—­this, namely, that “virtue secures its own success.”  “To stand on one’s own feet” Heeren finds the keynote to the discourses of Demosthenes, as of Chatham.

Eloquence, like every other art, rests on laws the most exact and determinate.  It is the best speech of the best soul.  It may well stand as the exponent of all that is grand and immortal in the mind.  If it do not so become an instrument, but aspires to be somewhat of itself, and to glitter for show, it is false and weak.  In its right exercise, it is an elastic, unexhausted power,—­who has sounded, who has estimated it?—­expanding with the expansion of our interests and affections.  Its great masters, whilst they valued every help to its attainment, and thought no pains too great which contributed in any manner to further it, and, resembling the Arabian warrior of fame, who wore seventeen weapons in his belt, and in personal combat used them all occasionally,—­yet undervalued all means, never permitted any talent, neither voice, rhythm, poetic power, anecdote, sarcasm, to appear for show, but were grave men, who preferred their integrity to their talent, and esteemed that object for which they toiled, whether the prosperity of their country, or the laws, or a reformation, or liberty of speech or of the press, or letters, or morals, as above the whole world, and themselves also.