int the whole mass, so has
the entire American mind been colored through the existence of this one
glowing personality. He placed a new interpretation on religion, and we
are different people because he lived.

He was not constructive, not administrative--he wrote much, but as
literature his work has small claim on immortality. He was an orator,
and the business of the orator is to inspire other men to think and act
for themselves.

Orators live but in memory. Their destiny is to be the sweet, elusive
fragrance of oblivion--the thyme and mignonette of things that were.

The limitations in the all-around man are by-products which are used by
destiny in the making of orators. The welling emotions, the vivid
imagination, the forgetfulness of self, the abandon to feeling--all
these things in Wall Street are spurious coin. No prudent man was ever
an orator--no cautious man ever made a multitude change its mind, when
it had vowed it would not.

Oratory is indiscretion set to music.

The great orator is great on account of his weaknesses as well as on
account of his strength. So why should we expect the orator to be the
impeccable man of perfect parts?

These essays attempt to give the man--they are neither a vindication nor
an apology.

Edmund Gosse has recently said something so wise and to the point on the
subject of biography that I can not resist the temptation to quote him:

If the reader will but bear with me so far as to endure the thesis
that the first theoretical object of the biographer should be
indiscretion, not discretion, I will concede almost everything
practical to delicacy. But this must be granted to me: that the aim
of all portraiture ought to be the emphasizing of what makes the
man different from, not like, other men. The widow almost always
desires that her deceased hero should be represented as exactly
like all other respectable men, only a little grander, a little
more glorified. She hates, as only a bad biographer can hate, the
telling of the truth with respect to those faults and foibles which
made the light and shade of his character. This, it appears, was
the primitive view of biography. The mass of medieval memorials was
of the "expanded-tract" order: it was mainly composed of lives of
the saints, tractates in which the possible and the impossible were
mingled in inextricable disorder, but where every word was inte