Amid such multiplicity of details he must sometimes have made mistakes, and with his great quickness of apprehension he sometimes formed hasty conclusions.  But no one has a right to say that his great acquirements were bought by any habitual sacrifice of thoroughness.  To say that they sometimes impaired the quality of his thought would undoubtedly be more just; and this is a serious charge to bring.  Learning is not accumulation, but assimilation; every man’s real acquirements must pass into his own organization, and undue or hasty nutrition does no good.  The most priceless knowledge is not worth the smallest impairing of the quality of the thinking.  The scholar cannot afford, any more than the farmer, to lavish his strength in clearing more land than he can cultivate; and Theodore Parker was compelled by the natural limits of time and strength to let vast tracts lie fallow, and to miss something of the natural resources of the soil.  One sometimes wished that he had studied less and dreamed more,—­for less encyclopedic information, and more of his own rich brain.

But it was in popularizing thought and knowledge that his great and wonderful power lay.  Not an original thinker, in the same sense with Emerson, he yet translated for tens of thousands that which Emerson spoke to hundreds only.  No matter who had been heard on any subject, the great mass of intelligent, “progressive” New-England thinkers waited to hear the thing summed up by Theodore Parker.  This popular interest went far beyond the circle of his avowed sympathizers; he might be a heretic, but nobody could deny that he was a marksman.  No matter how well others seemed to have hit the target, his shot was the triumphant one, at last.  Thinkers might find no new thought in the new discourse, leaders of action no new plan, yet, after all that had been said and done, his was the statement that told upon the community.  He knew this power of his, and had analyzed some of the methods by which he attained it, though, after all, the best part was an unconscious and magnetic faculty.  But he early learned, so he once told me, that the New-England people dearly love two things,—­a philosophical arrangement, and a plenty of statistics.  To these, therefore, he treated them thoroughly; in some of his “Ten Sermons” the demand made upon the systematizing power of his audience was really formidable; and I have always remembered a certain lecture of his on the Anglo-Saxons as the most wonderful instance that ever came within my knowledge of the adaptation of solid learning to the popular intellect.  Nearly two hours of almost unadorned fact,—­for there was far less than usual of relief and illustration,—­and yet the lyceum-audience listened to it as if an angel sang to them.  So perfect was his sense of purpose and of power, so clear and lucid was his delivery, with such wonderful composure did he lay out, section by section, his historical chart, that he grasped his hearers as absolutely as he grasped his subject: