public mind.  He did this, indeed, not merely by example.  He did it by dealing, as he thought, truly and in manly fashion with that public mind.  He evinced his love of the people not so much by honeyed phrases as by good counsels and useful service, vera pro gratis.  He showed how he appreciated them by submitting sound arguments to their understandings, and right motives to their free will.  He came before them, less with flattery than with instruction; less with a vocabulary larded with the words humanity and philanthropy, and progress and brotherhood, than with a scheme of politics, an educational, social and governmental system, which would have made them prosperous, happy and great.—­On the Death of Daniel Webster: RUFUS CHOATE.

A Study of Oratorical Style

8.  And yet this small people—­so obscure and outcast in condition—­so slender in numbers and in means—­so entirely unknown to the proud and great—­so absolutely without name in contemporary records—­whose departure from the Old World took little more than the breath of their bodies—­are now illustrious beyond the lot of men; and the Mayflower is immortal beyond the Grecian Argo or the stately ship of any victorious admiral.  Tho this was little foreseen in their day, it is plain now how it has come to pass.  The highest greatness surviving time and storm is that which proceeds from the soul of man.  Monarchs and cabinets, generals and admirals, with the pomp of courts and the circumstance of war, in the gradual lapse of time disappear from sight; but the pioneers of truth, the poor and lowly, especially those whose example elevates human nature and teaches the rights of man, so that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth, such harbingers can never be forgotten, and their renown spreads coextensive with the cause they served.—­The Qualities that Win: CHARLES SUMNER.

A Study in Profound Thinking

9.  There is something greater in the age than its greatest men; it is the appearance of a new power in the world, the appearance of the multitude of men on the stage where as yet the few have acted their parts alone.  This influence is to endure to the end of time.  What more of the present is to survive?  Perhaps much of which we now fail to note.  The glory of an age is often hidden from itself.  Perhaps some word has been spoken in our day which we have not designed to hear, but which is to grow clearer and louder through all ages.  Perhaps some silent thinker among us is at work in his closet whose name is to fill the earth.  Perhaps there sleeps in his cradle some reformer who is to move the church and the world, who is to open a new era in history, who is to fire the human soul with new hope and new daring.  What else is to survive the age?  That which the age has little thought of, but which is living in us all; I mean the soul, the immortal spirit.  Of this all ages are the unfoldings, and it is greater than all.  We must not feel, in the contemplation of the vast movements in our own and former times, as if we ourselves were nothing.  I repeat it, we are greater than all.  We are to survive our age, to comprehend it, and to pronounce its sentence.—­The Present Age: W. E. CHANNING.