m. It was his habit, whether unconscious or deliberate I
do not know, to speak to a great congregation with the freedom of
personal conversation, and to write for the press with as little reserve
as to an intimate friend. This habit of taking the public into his
confidence was one secret of his power, but it was also the cause of
those violations of conventionality in public address which were a great
charm to some and a grave defect to others. There are few writers or
orators who have addressed such audiences with such effect, whose style
has been so true and unmodified a reflection of their inner life. The
title of one of his most popular volumes might be appropriately made the
title of them all--'Life Thoughts.'

But while his style was wholly unartificial, it was no product of mere
careless genius; carelessness never gives a product worth possessing.
The excellences of Mr. Beecher's style were due to a careful study of
the great English writers; its defects to a temperament too eager to
endure the dull work of correction. In his early manhood he studied the
old English divines, not for their thoughts, which never took hold of
him, but for their style, of which he was enamored. The best
characterization of South and Barrow I ever heard he gave me once in a
casual conversation. The great English novelists he knew; Walter Scott's
novels, of which he had several editions in his library, were great
favorites with him, but he read them rather for the beauty of their
descriptive passages than for their romantic and dramatic interest.
Ruskin's 'Modern Painters' he both used himself and recommended to
others as a text-book in the observation of nature, and certain passages
in them he read and re-read.

But in his reading he followed the bent of his own mind rather than any
prescribed system. Neither in his public utterances nor in his private
conversation did he indicate much indebtedness to Shakespeare among the
earlier writers, nor to Emerson or Carlyle among the moderns. Though not
unfamiliar with the greatest English poets, and the great Greek poets in
translations, he was less a reader of poetry than of poetical prose. He
had, it is true, not only read but carefully compared Dante's 'Inferno'
with Milton's 'Paradise Lost'; still it was not the 'Paradise Lost,' it
was the 'Areopagitica' which he frequently read on Saturday nights, for
the sublimity of its style and the inspiration it afforded to the
imagination. He was