8.  There was another power in his speech sharper than in the speech of any other American orator,—­an unsparing invective.  The abolition appeal was essentially iconoclastic, and the method of a reformer at close quarters with a mighty system of wrong cannot be measured by the standards of cool and polite debate.  Phillips did not shrink from the sternest denunciation, or ridicule or scorn, of those who seemed to him recreant to freedom and humanity.  The idols of a purely conventional virtue he delighted to shatter, because no public enemy seemed to him more deadly than the American who made moral cowardice respectable.

9.  He knew that his ruthless words closed to him homes of friendship and hearts of sympathy.  He saw the amazement, he heard the condemnation; but, like the great apostle preaching Christ, he knew only humanity and humanity crucified.  Tongue of the dumb, eyes of the blind, feet of the impotent, his voice alone, among the voices that were everywhere heard and heeded, was sent by God to challenge every word, or look, or deed that seemed to him possibly to palliate oppression or to comfort the oppressor.

10.  I am not here to declare that the judgment of Wendell Phillips was always sound, nor his estimate of men always just, nor his policy always approved by the event.  I am not here to eulogize the mortal, but the immortal.

11.  The plain house in which he lived—­severely plain, because the welfare of the suffering and the slave were preferred to book, and picture, and every fair device of art; the house to which the north star led the trembling fugitive, and which the unfortunate and the friendless knew—­the radiant figure passing swiftly through these streets, plain as the house from which it came, regal with, a royalty beyond that of kings—­the ceaseless charity untold—­the strong, sustaining heart—­the sacred domestic affection that must not here be named—­the eloquence which, like the song of Orpheus, will fade from living memory into a doubtful tale—­the surrender of ambition, the consecration of a life hidden with God in sympathy with man—­these, all these, will live among your immortal traditions, heroic even in your heroic story.

12.  But not yours alone.  As years go by, and only the large outlines of lofty American characters and careers remain, the wide republic will confess the benediction of a life like this, and gladly own that if with perfect faith, and hope assured, America would still stand and “bid the distant generations hail,” the inspiration of her national life must be the sublime moral courage, the all-embracing humanity, the spotless integrity, the absolutely unselfish devotion of great powers to great public ends, which were the glory of Wendell Phillips.

George William Curtis.

The brook.

I.

I come from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally,
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley.