When the circumstances are grave enough to justify impassioned language a good speaker need not fear its effect.  If it be suitable, honest, and sincere, a peroration may be as emotional as human feelings dictate.  So-called “flowery language” seldom is the medium of deep feeling.  The strongest emotions may be expressed in the simplest terms.  Notice how, in the three extracts here quoted, the feeling is more intense in each succeeding one.  Analyze the style.  Consider the words, the phrases, the sentences in length and structure.  Explain the close relation of the circumstances and the speaker with the material and the style.  What was the purpose of each?

Sir, let it be to the honor of Congress that in these days of political strife and controversy, we have laid aside for once the sin that most easily besets us, and, with unanimity of counsel, and with singleness of heart and of purpose, have accomplished for our country one measure of unquestionable good.

    DANIEL WEBSTER:  Uniform System of Bankruptcy, 1840

Lord Chatham addressed the House of Lords in protest against the inhumanities of some of the early British efforts to suppress the American Revolution.

I call upon that right reverend bench, those holy ministers of the Gospel, and pious pastors of our Church—­I conjure them to join in the holy work, and vindicate the religion of their God.  I appeal to the wisdom and law of this learned bench, to defend and support the justice of their country.  I call upon the Bishops to interpose the unsullied sanctity of their lawn; upon the learned Judges, to interpose their purity upon the honor of your Lordships, to reverence the dignity of your ancestors and to maintain your own.  I call upon the spirit and humanity of my country, to vindicate the national character.  I invoke the genius of the Constitution.  From the tapestry that adorns these walls the immortal ancestor of this noble Lord frowns with indignation at the disgrace of his country....

I again call upon your Lordships, and the united powers of the state, to examine it thoroughly and decisively, and to stamp upon it an indelible stigma of the public abhorrence.  And I again implore those holy prelates of our religion to do away with these iniquities from among us!  Let them perform a lustration; let them purify this House, and this country, from this sin.

My Lords, I am old and weak, and at present unable to say more; but my feelings and indignation were too strong to have said less.  I could not have slept this night in my bed, nor reposed my head on my pillow, without giving vent to my eternal abhorrence of such preposterous and enormous principles.

At about the same time the same circumstances evoked several famous speeches, one of which ended with this well-known peroration.