in him were so
mingled that the bright gift was not accompanied by the usually
attendant shadow. All would admit, for instance, that his temperament
was the temperament of genius. The strings of an Aeolian harp are not
more responsive to the caressing wind than were the fibres of his frame
sensitive to the influence of beauty. His organization was delicate,
nervous, and impassioned. The grandeur and loveliness of Nature, fine
poetry, stirring eloquence, music under certain forms and conditions,
affected him to an extent to which men are rarely susceptible. And yet
with all these "robes and singing garlands" of genius about him, he was
entirely free from the irritability which usually accompanies genius.
His temper was as sweet as his organization was sensitive. The life of a
lawyer in great practice is very trying to the spirit, but no one ever
saw Mr. Choate discomposed or ruffled, and the sharp contentions of the
most protracted and hotly contested trial never extorted from him a
testy remark, a peevish exclamation, a wounding reflection. He never
wasted any of his nervous energy in scolding, fretting, or worrying.
Such invincible and inevitable sweetness of temper would have made the
most commonplace man attractive: we need not say what a charm it gave to
such powers and accomplishments as those of Mr. Choate.

So, too, there is the old, traditionary commonplace about genius
being one thing and application another, and their being in necessary
antagonism to each other. But Mr. Choate was a man of genius, at least
in its popular and generally received sense. The glance of his mind was
as rapid as the lightning; he learned almost by intuition; his fancy was
brilliant, discursive, and untiring; his perceptions were both quick
and correct: if there ever were a man who could have dispensed with the
painful acquisitions of labor, and been content with the spontaneous
growth of an uncultivated soil, that man was Mr. Choate. And yet who
ever worked harder than he? what plodding chronicler, what prosaic
Dryasdust ever went through a greater amount of drudgery than he? His
very industry had the intense and impassioned character which belonged
to his whole temperament and organization. He toiled with a fiery
earnestness and a concentration of purpose which burned into the very
heart of the subject he was investigating. The audience that hung with
delight upon one of his addresses to the jury, at the close of a long
and excitin