began at once where the pith
of his argument began; and had the secret, possessed by few writers, of
stopping the moment he was done; leaving his readers no chaff to sift
out from the simple wheat. This perfect absence of cloudy irrelevance
and encumbering superfluity was one source of his popularity as a
writer. His readers had to devour no husks to get at the kernel of what
he meant.

Besides these negative recommendations, Mr. Greeley's style had positive
merits of a very high order. The source of these was in the native
structure of his mind; no training could have conferred them; and it was
his original mental qualities, and not any special culture, that pruned
his writing of verbiage and redundancies. Whatever he saw, he saw with
wonderful distinctness. Whether it happened to be a sound idea or a
crotchet, it stood before his mind with the clearness of an object in
sunlight. He never groped at and around it, like one feeling in the
dark. He saw on which side he could lay hands on it at once with the
firmest grasp. It was his vividness of conception which made Mr. Greeley
so clear and succinct a writer. He knew precisely what he would be at,
and he hastened to say it in the fewest words. His choice of language,
though often homely, and sometimes quaint or coarse, was always adapted
to his purpose. He had a great command of racy phrases in common use,
and frequently gave them an unexpected turn which enlivened his style as
by a sudden stroke of wit or grotesque humor. But these touches were
rapid, never detained him; he kept grappling with his argument, and
hurried on.

This peculiar style was aided by the ardor of his feelings and his
vehement moral earnestness. Bent on convincing, he tried to flash his
meaning on the minds of his readers in the readiest and manliest way;
and he was so impatient to make them see the full force of his main
points that he stripped them as naked as he could. This combined
clearness of perception, strength of conviction, and hurrying ardor of
feeling, were the sources of a style which enabled him to write more
than any other journalist of his time, and yet always command attention.
But he is a model which none can successfully imitate without his
strongly marked individuality and peculiarities of mental structure. We
have mentioned his occasional coarseness; but it was merely his
preference of strong direct expression to dainty feebleness; he was
never vulgar.

Mr. Greeley has con