“Or lived and sung, that Life and Song
  Might each express the other’s all,
Careless if life or art were long
  Since both were one, to stand or fall: 

“So that the wonder struck the crowd,
  Who shouted it about the land: 
His song was only living aloud,
  His work, a singing with his hand!”

SIDNEY LANIER.

* * * * *

ELOQUENCE.

1.  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 farther than as 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, and in the occasion.

2.  Affected passion, intense expression, the pomp of declamation, all may aspire to it; they cannot reach it.  It comes, if it come at all, like the outbreaking of volcanic fires, with spontaneous, original, 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.

3.  Then patriotism is eloquent; then self-devotion is eloquent.  The clear conception, outrunning 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 all eloquence,—­it is action, noble, sublime, god-like action.

DANIEL WEBSTER.

* * * * *

TRUTH AT LAST.

Does a man ever give up hope, I wonder,—­
Face the grim fact, seeing it clear as day? 
When Bennen saw the snow slip, heard its thunder
Low, louder, roaring round him, felt the speed
Growing swifter as the avalanche hurled downward,
Did he for just one heart-throb—­did he indeed
Know with all certainty, as they swept onward,
There was the end, where the crag dropped away? 
Or did he think, even till they plunged and fell,
Some miracle would stop them?  Nay, they tell
That he turned round, face forward, calm and pale,
Stretching his arms out toward his native vale. 
As if in mute, unspeakable farewell,
And so went down.—­’Tis something if at last,
Though only for a flash, a man may see
Clear-eyed the future as he sees the past,
From doubt, or fear, or hope’s illusion free.