Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/128

 seemed to command all the registers of the church organ. To listen to him was at the same time a musical and an intellectual joy. A gesticulation as natural as it was expressive and graceful accompanied his speech, which flowed on in well-rounded and not seldom poetic sentences.

When Kinkel offered to introduce his hearers in a special course to the art of speech, I was one eagerly to seize the opportunity. He did not deliver theoretical instruction in rhetorics, but he began at once to produce before us eminent models and to exercise our faculties by means of them. As such models he selected some of the great rhetorical passages in the dramas of Shakespeare, and for me he set the task to explain the famous funeral oration of Marc Antony, to point out the intended effects and the means by which these effects were to be accomplished, and finally to recite the whole speech. I accomplished this task to his satisfaction, and then Kinkel invited me to visit him at his house. I soon followed this invitation, and the result was the development between teacher and scholar of a most agreeable personal intercourse. He possessed in a high degree the genial unconventionality and the gay temper of the Rhineland.

He delighted to put the professor aside and to let himself go when in the circle of his family and friends in unrestrained hilarity. He drank his glass of wine—with moderation, to be sure—laughed heartily at a good jest and even at a poor one, drew from all circumstances of life as much enjoyment as there was in them, and grumbled little when fate was unkind. Thus one soon felt at home in his company. He had indeed also his detractors, who accused him of being what they called “vain.” But who is not vain, each one in his way? Vanity is the most common and the most natural of all weaknesses of character—and at the same time the most harmless and the