From the Easy Chair, vol 1 | Page 2

bustle, moving the seats, taking off their coats, sedately
interchanging little jests, and finally seating themselves, and gazing at
the audience evidently with a feeling of doubt whether the honor of the
position compensates for its great disadvantage; for to sit behind an

orator is to hear, without seeing, an actor.
The audience is now waiting, both upon the stage and in the boxes,
with patient expectation. There is little talking, but a tension of heads
towards the stage. The last word is spoken there, the last joke expires;
all attention is concentrated upon an expected object. The edge of
eagerness is not suffered to turn, but precisely at the right moment a
figure with a dark head and another with a gray head are seen at the
depth of the stage, advancing through the aisle towards the foot-lights
and the audience. They are the president of the society and the orator.
The audience applauds. It is not a burst of enthusiasm; it is rather
applausive appreciation of acknowledged merit. The gray-headed
orator bows gravely and slightly, lays a roll of MS. upon the table, then
he and the president seat themselves side by side. For a moment they
converse, evidently complimenting the brilliant audience. The orator,
also, evidently says that the table is right, that the light is right, that the
glass of water is right, and finally that he is ready.
In a few neat words "the honored son of Massachusetts" is introduced,
and he rises and moves a few steps forward. Standing for a moment, he
bows to the applause. He is dressed entirely in black; wearing a
dress-coat, and not a frock. Before he says a word, although it is but a
moment, a sudden flash of memory reveals to the attentive Easy Chair
all that he has heard and read of the orator before him; how he returned
an accomplished scholar from Germany, graced with a delicacy of
culture hitherto unknown to our schools; how the youthful professor of
Greek at Harvard, transferred to the pulpit of Brattle Street, in Boston,
held men and women in thrall by the splendor of his rhetoric and the
pleading music of his voice, drawing the young scholars after him, who
are now our chief glory and pride; how his Phi Beta Kappa oration in
1824 and its apostrophe to Lafayette, who was present, is still the fond
tradition of those who heard it; and how as he passed on from triumph
to triumph in his art of oratory, the elegance, the skill, the floridity, the
elaboration, the unfailing fitness and severe propriety of his art, with all
its minor gifts, consoled Boston that it was not Athens or Rome, and
had not heard Demosthenes or Cicero.
If you ventured curiously to question this fond recollection, to ask
whether the eloquence was of the heart and soul, or of the mind and lips;
whether it were impassioned oratory, burning, resistless, such as we

suppose Demosthenes and Patrick Henry poured out; or whether it were
polished and skilful declamation--those old listeners were like lovers.
They did not know; they did not care. They remembered the magic tone,
the witchery of grace, the exuberant rhetoric; they recalled the crowds
clustering at his feet, the gusts of emotion that in the church swept over
the pews, the thrills of delight that in the hall shook the audience; their
own youth was part of it; they saw their own bloom in the flower they
remembered, and they could not criticise or compare.
All this recollection flashed through the mind of the Easy Chair before
the orator had well opened his lips. The tradition was overpowering. It
was not fair, but it was inevitable. If we could see and hear Patrick
Henry, with uplifted finger, shouting, "Charles First had his Cromwell,
and George Third--may take warning by his example!" would it be,
could it be, even with all our expectation, what we believe it to have
been? After the tremendous blare of trumpets in advance that shake our
very souls within us, no ordinary mortal can satisfy the transcendent
anticipation. We lift the leathern curtain of St. Peter's, and catching our
breath, look in. Alas! we see plainly the other end of the great church,
but with secret disappointment, because we imagined there would be
but a dim immensity of space. For the first time we behold Niagara,
and resentfully we ask, "Is that all?" The illimitable expectation is too
bewildering an overture. So the eyes with which the Easy Chair saw
were touched with glamour. The ears with which it heard were full of
eloquence beyond that of mortal lips. And there was the orator just
beginning to speak. It was not fair; no, it was not fair.
The first words were clearly cut, simply