Vigorous, rich, brilliant, copious, they yet seldom
afford a sentence which falls in perfect cadence upon the ear; under a
show of regular method, they are loose and diffuse, and often have the
qualities which he himself attributed to the style of John Quincy
Adams,--"disorderly, ill-compacted, and homely to a fault." He said of
Dr. Channing,--"Diffuseness is the old Adam of the pulpit. There are
always two ways of hitting the mark,--one with a single bullet, the
other with a shower of small shot: Dr. Channing chose the latter, as
most of our pulpit orators have done." Theodore Parker chose it also.
Perhaps Nature and necessity chose it for him. If not his temperament,
at least the circumstances of his position, cut him off from all high
literary finish. He created the congregation at the Music Hall, and
that congregation, in turn, moulded his whole life. For that great
stage his eloquence became inevitably a kind of brilliant
scene-painting,--large, fresh, profuse, rapid, showy;--masses of light
and shade, wonderful effects, but farewell forever to all finer
touches and delicate gradations! No man can write for posterity, while
hastily snatching a half-day from a week's lecturing, during which to
prepare a telling Sunday harangue for three thousand people. In the
perpetual rush and hurry of his life, he had no time to select, to
discriminate, to omit anything, or to mature anything. He had the
opportunities, the provocatives, and the drawbacks which make the work
and mar the fame of the professional journalist.
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