Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/93

Rh as a public man! It acted much through his eloquence, but not through his eloquence alone. His speech was not a graceful flow of melodious periods, now drawing on the listener with the persuasive tone of confidential conversation, then carrying him along with a more rapid rush of thought and language, and at last lifting him up with the peals of reason in passion. His arguments marched forth at once in grave and stately array; his sentences like rows of massive Doric columns, unrelieved by pleasing variety, severe and imposing. His orations, especially those pronounced in the Senate before the war, contain many passages of grandest beauty. There was nothing kindly persuasive in his utterance; his reasoning appeared in the form of consecutive assertion, not seldom strictly logical and irresistibly strong. His mighty appeals were always addressed to the noblest instincts of human nature. His speech was never enlivened by anything like wit or humor. They were foreign to his nature. He has never been guilty of a flash of irony or sarcasm. His weapon was not the foil, but the battle-axe.

He has often been accused of being uncharitable to opponents in debate, and of wounding their feelings with uncalled-for harshness of language. He was guilty of that, but no man was less conscious of the stinging force of his language than he. He was often sorry for the effect his thrusts had produced, but being always so firmly and honestly persuaded of the correctness of his own opinions, that he could scarcely ever appreciate the position of an opponent, he fell into the same fault again. Not seldom he appeared haughty in his assumptions of authority; but it was the imperiousness of profound conviction, which, while sometimes exasperating his hearers, yet scarcely ever failed to exercise over them a certain sway. His fancy was not fertile, his figures mostly labored and stiff. In his later years his vast learning