impassioned eyrie.

But how would such a style of eloquence--if, indeed, truth will permit
the name of eloquence to be applied to the reading of matter from a
preconcerted manuscript--how would such a style of delivery be received
out in the wild West? Place your textual speaker out in the backwoods,
on the stump, where a surging tide of humanity streams strongly around
him, where the people press up toward him on every side, their keen
eyes intently perusing his to see if he be in real earnest,--"dead in
earnest"--and where, as with a thousand darts, their contemptuous scorn
would pierce him through if he were found playing a false game, trying
to pump up tears by mere acting, or arousing an excitement without
feeling it. Would such a style of oratory succeed there? By no means.
The place is different; the hearers are different; the time, the thing
required, all the circumstances, are totally different. Here, in the
vast unwalled church of nature, with the leafy tree-tops for a ceiling,
their massy stems for columns; with the endless mysterious cadences of
the forest for a choir; with the distant or nearer music and murmur of
streams, and the ever-returning voice of birds, sounding in their ears
for the made-up music of a picked band of exclusive singers: here stand
men whose ears are trained to catch the faintest foot-fall of the
distant deer, or the rustle of their antlers against branch or bough of
the forest track--whose eyes are skilled to discern the trail of savages
who leave scarce a track behind them; and who will follow upon
that trail--utterly invisible to the untrained eye--as surely as a
blood-hound follows the scent, ten or twenty, or a hundred miles, whose
eye and hand are so well practised that they can drive a nail, or snuff
a candle, with the long, heavy western rifle. Such men, educated for
years, or even generations, in that hard school of necessity, where
every one's hand and wood-man's skill must keep his head; where
incessant pressing necessities required ever a prompt and sufficient
answer in deeds; and where words needed to be but few, and those
the plainest and directest, required no delay nor preparation, nor
oratorical coquetting, nor elaborate preliminary scribble; no hesitation
nor doubts in deeds; no circumlocution in words. To restrain, influence,
direct, govern, such a surging sea of life as this, required something
very different from a written address.

[Footnote 20: Born in Philadel