Coupled with this clearness of vision and singleness of purpose was a sympathy with men singularly broad and alert.  He knew the way to men’s minds, and adapted his method to the minds he wished to reach.  This quality put him at once en rapport with his auditors, and with men of widely different mental constitution.  Probably no preacher has ever habitually addressed so heterogeneous a congregation as that which he attracted to Plymouth Church.  In his famous speech at the Herbert Spencer dinner he was listened to with equally rapt attention by the great philosopher and by the French waiters, who stopped in their service, arrested and held by his mingled humor, philosophy, and restrained emotion.  This human sympathy gave a peculiar dramatic quality to his imagination.  He not only recalled and reproduced material images from the past with great vividness, he re-created in his own mind the experiences of men whose mold was entirely different from his own.  As an illustration of this, a comparison of two sermons on Jacob before Pharaoh, one by Dr. Talmage, the other by Mr. Beecher, is interesting and instructive.  Dr. Talmage devotes his imagination wholly to reproducing the outward circumstances,—­the court in its splendor and the patriarch with his wagons, his household, and his stuff; this scene Mr. Beecher etches vividly but carelessly in a few outlines, then proceeds to delineate with care the imagined feelings of the king, awed despite his imperial splendor by the spiritual majesty of the peasant herdsman.  Yet Mr. Beecher could paint the outer circumstances with care when he chose to do so.  Some of his flower pictures in ’Fruits, Flowers, and Farming’ will always remain classic models of descriptive literature, the more amazing that some of them are portraits of flowers he had never seen when he wrote the description.

While his imagination illuminated nearly all he said or wrote, it was habitually the instrument of some moral purpose; he rarely ornamented for ornament’s sake.  His pictures gave beauty, but they were employed not to give beauty but clearness.  He was thus saved from mixed metaphors, the common fault of imaginative writings which are directed to no end, and thus are liable to become first lawless, then false, finally self-contradictory and absurd.  The massive Norman pillars of Durham Cathedral are marred by the attempt which some architect has made to give them grace and beauty by adding ornamentation.  Rarely if ever did Mr. Beecher fall into the error of thus mixing in an incongruous structure two architectural styles.  He knew when to use the Norman strength and solidity, and when the Gothic lightness and grace.