He was the very soul of friendship; he had a genius for it.  The friends that he made are only limited by the want of personal contact with him.  In the making of them it may be said “He came, he saw, he conquered.”  How wide he opened his arms to receive us!  There were no partition walls to be levelled before we approached him.  It required no studied effort to get at him.  The way was always clear; the door was without a latch-string even; it was open.  You never had to ask, Is Mr. Powell in a proper mood to see his friends to-day?  Why, it was worth a journey of fifty miles just to meet that man and receive a grasp of his hand!  I remember going to a depot in Chicago to meet him as he came in on the train.  As soon as he singled me out from the crowd, he rushed towards me, exclaiming in his bantering way:  “Well, well, well, this is the first sensible thing I ever knew you to do, come on old fellow;” and he grasped my arm and hurried me away, saying, “I am just glad to see you.”  When it is said, that he is the “best beloved of all,” is it not because he first loved us?  The generosity and friendliness of his soul captured our hearts.  I imagine that many thousands of dollars were poured into the treasury of the A.M.A. evoked by the love kindled in hearts for our brother.  Men came to love the cause through him who loved them.

Mr. Powell was a man of enthusiasm; he worked at white heat.  The logic of his whole life seemed to be, “What I do I must do quickly.”  He could not stop; he must hurry on.  He could pass easily from one thing to another.  In all the years of my acquaintance with him I never knew him to rest as other people rest.  If his body was not active his mind was.  The river of his life had no sluggish intervals; it was a torrent from first to last.  His step was a bound; his thought rushed in its movement.  He could write a sermon in less time than any other man in the seminary, so far as I know.  Plans came to him like an inspiration and were unfolded with a rapidity that seemed to me wonderful.  His scholarship was not technical.  He always enjoyed the larger sweep of things.  He would have been the last man to devote his life to the Greek preterite, and to question whether it would not have been better to have confined himself to the dative case!  Such minutiae of erudition might be fascinating to others; it was not for him.  His large-heartedness, his sympathy, his wealthy and generous spirit could not be condensed into a bookworm, or a recluse.  They rather equipped him to become a watchman, that he might declare what he saw.  He needed the whole Republic to range up and down in.  His ringing words might be heard on our Western frontier; but before their echoes had scarcely died away, their wakening notes might be taken up and reiterated on our New England coast.  He was a voice crying in the land.  Like the Great Master, he was sent to “heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, to set at liberty them that are bruised.”  It was the down-trodden races for which he lived.  Such a candle of the Lord would burn down to its socket before the day was half spent.  Such hot haste and burning zeal must consume to ashes before the meridian is turned.