The orator must know how so to utter his thought that it
will stay. The poet and the orator have this in common.
Each must so express and clothe his thought that it shall
penetrate and take possession of the soul, and, having penetrated,
must abide and stay. How this is done, who can tell? Carlyle
defines poetry as a "sort of lilt." Cicero find the secret
of eloquence in a
Lepos quidem celeritasque et brevitas.
One writer lately dead, who has a masterly gift of noble
and stirring eloquence, finds it in "a certain collocation of
consonants." Why it is that a change of a single word, or
even of a single syllable, for any other which is an absolute
synonym in sense, would ruin the best line in Lycidas, or
injure terribly the noblest sentence of Webster, nobody knows.
Curtis asks how Wendell Phillips did it, and answers his own
question by asking you how Mozart did it.
When I say that I am not sure that this is not the single
gift most to be coveted by man, I may seem to have left out
the moral quality in my conception of what is excellent. But
such is the nature of man that the loftiest moral emotions
are still the overmastering emotions.
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