of character, which, because it did not and could not fear anybody,
made nothing of their antagonists, and became sometimes exquisitely
provoking and sometimes terrific to these.

We are slenderly furnished with anecdotes of these men, nor can we
help ourselves by those heavy books in which their discourses are
reported. Some of them were writers, like Burke; but most of them were
not, and no record at all adequate to their fame remains. Besides,
what is best is lost, the fiery life of the moment. But the conditions
for eloquence always exist. It is always dying out of famous places,
and appearing in corners. Wherever the polarities meet, wherever the
fresh moral sentiment, the instinct of freedom and duty, come in
direct opposition to fossil conservatism and the thirst of gain, the
spark will pass. The resistance to slavery in this country has been a
fruitful nursery of orators. The natural connection by which it drew
to itself a train of moral reforms, and the slight yet sufficient
party organization it offered, reinforced the city with new blood from
the woods and mountains. Wild men, John Baptists, Hermit Peters, John
Knoxes, utter the savage sentiment of Nature in the heart of
commercial capitals. They send us every year some piece of aboriginal
strength, some tough oak-stick of a man who is not to be silenced or
insulted or intimidated by a mob, because he is more mob than
they,--one who mobs the mob,--some sturdy countryman, on whom neither
money, nor politeness, nor hard words, nor eggs, nor blows, nor
brickbats, make any impression. He is fit to meet the bar-room wits
and bullies; he is a wit and a bully himself, and something more; he
is a graduate of the plough, and the stub-hoe, and the bush-whacker;
knows all the secrets of swamp and snow-bank, and has nothing to learn
of labor or poverty or the rough of farming. His hard head went
through in childhood the drill of Calvinism, with text and