Indeed, his conversational power was so wonderful that no one could go away from a first interview without astonishment and delight.  There are those among us, it may be, more brilliant in anecdote or repartee, more eloquent, more profoundly suggestive; but for the outpouring of vast floods of various and delightful information, I believe that he could have had no Anglo-Saxon rival, except Macaulay.  And in Mr. Parker’s case, at least, there was no alloy of conversational arrogance or impatience of opposition.  He monopolized, not because he was ever unwilling to hear others, but because they did not care to hear themselves when he was by.  The subject made no difference; he could talk on anything.  I was once with him in the society of an intelligent Quaker farmer, when the conversation fell on agriculture:  the farmer held his own ably for a time; but long after he was drained dry, our wonderful companion still flowed on exhaustless, with accounts of Nova Scotia ploughing and Tennessee hoeing, and all things rural, ancient and modern, good and bad, till it seemed as if the one amusing and interesting theme in the universe were the farm.  But it soon proved that this was only one among his thousand departments, and his hearers felt, as was said of old Fuller, as if he had served his time at every trade in town.

But it must now be owned that these astonishing results were bought by some intellectual sacrifices which his nearer friends do not all recognize, but which posterity will mourn.  Such a rate of speed is incompatible with the finest literary execution.  A delicate literary ear he might have had, perhaps, but he very seldom stopped to cultivate or even indulge it.  This neglect was not produced by his frequent habit of extemporaneous speech alone; for it is a singular fact, that Wendell Phillips, who rarely writes a line, yet contrives to give to his hastiest efforts the air of elaborate preparation, while Theodore Parker’s most scholarly performances were still stump-speeches.  Vigorous, rich, brilliant, copious, they yet seldom afford a sentence which falls in perfect cadence upon the ear; under a show of regular method, they are loose and diffuse, and often have the qualities which he himself attributed to the style of John Quincy Adams,—­“disorderly, ill-compacted, and homely to a fault.”  He said of Dr. Channing,—­“Diffuseness is the old Adam of the pulpit.  There are always two ways of hitting the mark,—­one with a single bullet, the other with a shower of small shot:  Dr. Channing chose the latter, as most of our pulpit orators have done.”  Theodore Parker chose it also.