Page:Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs (Volume One).djvu/243

Rh speeches which were prepared were written by these assistants, to whom he dictated the text. By their aid he was able to prepare his speeches with a celerity that was incomprehensible to the Western mind.

His first speech in Boston was delivered the twenty-seventh day of April, 1852, the day that he completed his fiftieth year. When in private conversation I spoke of the circumstance that it was my good fortune to welcome him to the State on that anniversary, he said: “Yes, it is a marked day; but unless my poor country is saved I shall soon wither away and die.”

His voice, whether in public speech or in private conversation, commanded sympathy by its tones, even when his words were not comprehended. In his oratory there was exaggeration in statement, a characteristic that is common to orators, but not more strongly marked in the speeches of Kossuth than in the speeches of those with whom he might be compared.

His powers of imagination were not extraordinary, and of word painting he has not left a single striking example,—not one passage that can be used for recitation or declamation in the schools. His cause was too pressing, his manner of life was too serious, for any indulgences in speech. In every speech he had an object in view; and even when he was without hope for Hungary in the near future, he yet announced and advocated doctrines and truths on which he relied for the political regeneration of Europe. He spoke to propositions,—clearly, concisely, convincingly.

In one oratorical art Kossuth was an adept; he deprecated all honors to himself, and with great tact he transferred them to his country and to the cause that he represented:

“As to me, indeed, it would be curious if the names of the great men who invented the plough and the alphabet, who changed the corn into flour and the flour into bread, should be forgotten, and my name remembered.”