oughing and Tennessee hoeing, and all things
rural, ancient and modern, good and bad, till it seemed as if the one
amusing and interesting theme in the universe were the farm. But it
soon proved that this was only one among his thousand departments, and
his hearers felt, as was said of old Fuller, as if he had served his
time at every trade in town.

But it must now be owned that these astonishing results were bought by
some intellectual sacrifices which his nearer friends do not all
recognize, but which posterity will mourn. Such a rate of speed is
incompatible with the finest literary execution. A delicate literary
ear he might have had, perhaps, but he very seldom stopped to
cultivate or even indulge it. This neglect was not produced by his
frequent habit of extemporaneous speech alone; for it is a singular
fact, that Wendell Phillips, who rarely writes a line, yet contrives
to give to his hastiest efforts the air of elaborate preparation,
while Theodore Parker's most scholarly performances were still
stump-speeches. Vigorous, rich, brilliant, copious, they yet seldom
afford a sentence which falls in perfect cadence upon the ear; under a
show of regular method, they are loose and diffuse, and often have the
qualities which he himself attributed to the style of John Quincy
Adams,--"disorderly, ill-compacted, and homely to a fault." He said of
Dr. Channing,--"Diffuseness is the old Adam of the pulpit. There are
always two ways of hitting the mark,--one with a single bullet, the
other with a shower of small shot: Dr. Channing chose the latter, as
most of our pulpit orators have done." Theodore Parker chose it also.

Perhaps Nature and necessity chose it for him. If not his temperament,
at least the circumstances of his position, cut him off from all high
literary finish. He created the congregation at the Music Hall, and
that congregation, in turn, moulded his whole life. For that great
stage his eloquence became inevitably a kind of brilliant
scene-painting,--large, fresh, profuse, rapid, showy;--masses of light
and shade, wonderful effects, but farewell forever to all finer
touches and delicate gradations! No man can write for posterity, while
hastily snatching a half-day from a week's lecturing, during which to
prepare a telling Sunday harangue for three thousand people. In the
perpetual rush and hurry of his life, he had no time to select, to
discriminate, to omit anything, or to mature anything. He had the
opport