en singularly broad and alert. He knew the way to men's
minds, and adapted his method to the minds he wished to reach. This
quality put him at once _en rapport_ with his auditors, and with men of
widely different mental constitution. Probably no preacher has ever
habitually addressed so heterogeneous a congregation as that which he
attracted to Plymouth Church. In his famous speech at the Herbert
Spencer dinner he was listened to with equally rapt attention by the
great philosopher and by the French waiters, who stopped in their
service, arrested and held by his mingled humor, philosophy, and
restrained emotion. This human sympathy gave a peculiar dramatic quality
to his imagination. He not only recalled and reproduced material images
from the past with great vividness, he re-created in his own mind the
experiences of men whose mold was entirely different from his own. As an
illustration of this, a comparison of two sermons on Jacob before
Pharaoh, one by Dr. Talmage, the other by Mr. Beecher, is interesting
and instructive. Dr. Talmage devotes his imagination wholly to
reproducing the outward circumstances,--the court in its splendor and
the patriarch with his wagons, his household, and his stuff; this scene
Mr. Beecher etches vividly but carelessly in a few outlines, then
proceeds to delineate with care the imagined feelings of the king, awed
despite his imperial splendor by the spiritual majesty of the peasant
herdsman. Yet Mr. Beecher could paint the outer circumstances with care
when he chose to do so. Some of his flower pictures in 'Fruits, Flowers,
and Farming' will always remain classic models of descriptive
literature, the more amazing that some of them are portraits of flowers
he had never seen when he wrote the description.

While his imagination illuminated nearly all he said or wrote, it was
habitually the instrument of some moral purpose; he rarely ornamented
for ornament's sake. His pictures gave beauty, but they were employed
not to give beauty but clearness. He was thus saved from mixed
metaphors, the common fault of imaginative writings which are directed
to no end, and thus are liable to become first lawless, then false,
finally self-contradictory and absurd. The massive Norman pillars of
Durham Cathedral are marred by the attempt which some architect has made
to give them grace and beauty by adding ornamentation. Rarely if ever
did Mr. Beecher fall into the error of thus mixing in an incongruous
stru