lways in touch
with the actualities of life, and a masterful conscience compelled him
to use his aesthetic faculties in sterner service than in the
entertainment of mankind. The intensity of his moral nature enhanced
rather than subdued his exuberant humor, which love prevented from
becoming satire, and seriousness preserved from degenerating into wit.
His native faculty of mimicry led men to call him an actor, yet he
wholly lacked the essential quality of a good actor,--power to take on
another's character,--and used the mimic art only to interpret the truth
which at the moment possessed him.

Such power of passion as was his is not often seen mated to such
self-control; for while he spoke with utter abandon, he rarely if ever
did so until he had carefully deliberated the cause he was espousing. He
thought himself deficient in memory, and in fact rarely borrowed
illustrations from his reading either of history or of literature; but
his keenness of observation photographed living scenes upon an unfading
memory which years after he could and did produce at will. All these
contrary elements of his strangely composite though not incongruous
character entered into his style,--or, to speak more accurately, his
styles,--and make any analysis of them within reasonable limits
difficult, if not impossible.

For the writer is known by his style as the wearer by his clothes. Even
if it be no native product of the author's mind, but a conscious
imitation of carefully studied models,--what I may call a tailor-made
style, fashioned in a vain endeavor to impart sublimity to commonplace
thinking,--the poverty of the author is thereby revealed, much as the
boor is most clearly disclosed when wearing ill-at-ease, unaccustomed
broadcloth. Mr. Beecher's style was not artificial; its faults as well
as its excellences were those of extreme naturalness. He always wrote
with fury; rarely did he correct with phlegm. His sermons were published
as they fell from his lips,--correct and revise he would not. The too
few editorials which he wrote, on the eve of the Civil War, were written
while the press was impatiently waiting for them, were often taken page
by page from his hand, and were habitually left unread by him to be
corrected in proof by others.

[Illustration: HENRY WARD BEECHER.]

His lighter contributions to the New York Ledger were thrown off in
the same way, generally while the messenger waited to take them to the
editorial sanctu