With a warm, poetic imagination, Nature had given him quick perceptive powers, and the faculty of expressing his thoughts without apparent effort, in simple, strong language, as well defined, and sharply cut as a cameo.  Beyond this, and better than all, was a tender, sympathetic sensibility; which, if it sometimes overmastered him, made him the master of others.  The commonest things in his hands took the motion and color of living things.  It was not the mere sensuous magnetism of powerful physical nature; but it excited the higher intellectual sympathies, which in turn awoke and captivated the reasoning and reflective organs, that found themselves delightfully conducted along a natural and logical course, that led them unconsciously to inevitable conclusions and convictions, ere the danger was perceived, or an alarm was sounded.

On the present occasion, he had not been on his feet five minutes ere it was felt that a real power, of an unusual order, was manifesting itself.

The case was not one framed or arranged with any vulgar reference to a forensic display.  Cases never will get themselves up for any such occasion; and if the lawyer waits for such a case, he will die unknown.  Cases spring out of dry, hard contentions, with nothing but vulgar surroundings; and it is to these, that the real advocate applies himself, breathes upon them the breath of genius and creative power, and clothes them with life, and interest, and beauty, endows them with his own soul and imagination, and lifts them from the level of the common to the height of the remarkable, the unusual, and sometimes of the wonderful; and endeavors to establish between them, and a jury and himself, the bonds of intense sympathy, upon which their emotions and sensibilities will come and go, as did the angels on the dream-ladder of the patriarch.

In the advocate’s hour of strength and glory, the formulas of the law burst their mouldy cerements and leap forth into life, tender and beautiful to protect, or awful to warn or punish.  Mysteries are unfolded, secrets reveal themselves, hidden things are proclaimed, and courts and juries, awed and abashed, yet elevated and inspired, accept and act upon his conclusions as infallible.  For one hour he touches the pinnacle of human achievement.

After all, the effectiveness of the advocate is not so much in what he says, as in the way he says it.  One man with real strength arises outside, and batters and bangs with real power, deals forcible blows, and yet does not carry his point; while another, with less intellect, gets up within the charmed circle of the sympathies, by the warm, human side of a jury, whom they don’t think of resisting, and could not if they tried.