and warms the yet damp shirts, stockings, and bed-linen brought into the house from the clothes-lines in the yard, is an astounding illustration of that "familiar grasp of things divine," which obtains in so many of our rustic households. Dante or Chaucer, two of the greatest poets of the world, would, had they happened to be "uneducated" men, have seized on just such an image to express their idea of the Divine beneficence.

This natural, this instinctive operation of the imaginative faculty, is often observed in children. Numberless are the stories told by fond mothers of the wonderful things uttered by their babies, shortly after they have left their cradles. The most striking peculiarity running through them all is the astonishing audacity with which the child treats the most sacred things. He or she seems to have no sense of awe. All children are taught to believe that God resides above them in the sky; and I shall never forget the shock of surprise I felt at the answer of a boy of five years—whom I found glorying over the treasures of his first paint-box—to my question: "Which color do you like best?" "Oh," he carelessly replied, "I like best sky-blue,—God's color." And the little rogue went on, daubing the paper before him with a mixture of all colors, utterly unconscious that he had said any thing remarkable; and yet what Mrs. Browning specially distinguishes as the characteristic of the first and one of the greatest of English poets, Chaucer, namely, his "familiar grasp of things Divine," could not have found a more appropriate illustration than in this chance remark of a mere child, expressing the fearlessness of his faith in the Almighty Father above him.

Now in all these instinctive operations of the imagination, whether in the mind of a child or in that of a grown man, it is easy to discern the mark of sincerity. If the child is petted, and urged by his mother to display his brightness before a company of other mothers and other babies, he is in danger of learning early that trick of falsehood, which clings to him when he goes to school, when he leaves the school for the college, and when he leaves the college for the pursuits of professional life. The farmer or mechanic, not endowed with "college larnin'," is sure to become a bad declaimer, perhaps a demagogue, when he abandons those natural illustrations and ornaments of his speech which spring from his individual experience, and strives to emulate the grandiloquence of those graduates of colleges who have the heathen mythology at the ends of their fingers and tongues, and can refer to Jove, Juno, Minerva, Diana, Venus, Vulcan, and Neptune, as though they were resident deities and deesses of the college halls. The trouble with most "uneducated" orators is, that they become enamored of these shining gods and goddesses, after they have lost, through repetition, all of their old power to give point or force to any good sentence of modern oratory. During the times when, to be a speaker at Abolitionist meetings, the speaker ran the risk of being pelted with rotten eggs, I happened to be present, as one of a small antislavery audience, gathered in an equally small hall. Among the speakers was an honest, strong-minded, warm-hearted young mechanic, who, as long as he was true to his theme, spoke earnestly, manfully, and well; but alas! he thought he could not close without calling in some god or goddess to give emphasis—after the method of college students—to his previous statements. He selected, of course, that unfortunate phantom whom he called the Goddess of Liberty. "Here, in Boston," he thundered, "where she was cradled in Faneuil Hall, can it be that Liberty should be trampled under foot, when, after two generations have passed,—yes, sir, have elapsed,—she has grown—yes, sir, I repeat it, has grown—grown up, sir, into a great man?" The change in sex was, in this case, more violent than usual; but how many instances occur to everybody's recollection, where that poor Goddess has been almost equally outraged, through a puerile ambition on the part of the orator to endow her with an exceptional distinction by senseless rhodomontade, manufactured by the word-machine which he presumes to call his imagination! All imitative imagery is the grave of common-sense.

Now let us pass to an imagination which is, perhaps, the grandest in American oratory, but which was as perfectly natural as that of the "cold molasses," or "God's flat-iron," of the New England farmer,—as natural, indeed, as the "sky-blue, God's color," of the New England boy. Daniel Webster, standing on the heights of Quebec at an early hour of a summer morning, heard the ordinary morning drum-beat which called the garrison to their duty. Knowing that the British possessions belted the globe, the thought occurred to him that the morning drum would go on beating in some English post to the time when it would sound again in Quebec. Afterwards, in a speech on President Jackson's Protest, he dwelt on the fact that our Revolutionary forefathers engaged in a war with Great Britain on a strict question of principle, "while actual suffering was still afar off." How could he give most effect to this statement? It would have been easy for him to have presented statistical tables, showing the wealth, population, and resources of England, followed by an enumeration of her colonies and military stations, all going to prove the enormous strength of the nation against which the United American colonies raised their improvised flag. But the thought which had heretofore occurred to him at Quebec happily recurred to his mind the moment it was needed; and he flashed on the imagination an image of British power which no statistics could have conveyed to the understanding,—"a Power," he said, "which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drum-beat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England." Perhaps a mere rhetorician might consider superfluous the word "whole," as applied to "globe," and "unbroken," as following "continuous"; yet they really add to the force and majesty of the expression. It is curious that, in Great Britain, this magnificent impersonation of the power of England is so little known. It is certain that it is unrivalled in British patriotic oratory. Not Chatham, not even Burke, ever approached it in the noblest passages in which they celebrated the greatness and glory of their country. Webster, it is to be noted, introduced it in his speech, not for the purpose of exalting England, but of exalting our Revolutionary forefathers, whose victory, after a seven years' war of terrible severity, waged in vindication of a principle, was made all the more glorious from having been won over an adversary so formidable and so vast.

It is reported that, at the conclusion of this speech on the President's Protest, John Sergeant, of Philadelphia, came up to the orator, and, after cordially shaking hands with him, eagerly asked, "Where, Webster, did you get that idea of the morning drum-beat?" Like other public men, accustomed to address legislative assemblies, he was naturally desirous of knowing the place, if place there was, where such images and illustrations were to be found. The truth was that, if Webster had ever read Goethe's Faust,—which he of course never had done,—he might have referred his old friend to that passage where Faust, gazing at the setting sun, aches to follow it in its course for ever. "See," he exclaims, "how the green-girt cottages shimmer in the setting sun. He bends and sinks,—the day is outlived. Yonder he hurries off, and quickens other life. Oh, that I have no wing to lift me from the ground, to struggle after—for ever after—him! I should see, in everlasting evening beams, the stilly world at my feet, every height on fire, every vale in repose, the silver brook flowing into golden streams. The rugged mountain, with all its dark defiles,