one was compelled to believe that he might read the people the Sanscrit Lexicon, and they would listen with ever fresh delight.  Without grace or beauty or melody, his mere elocution was sufficient to produce effects which melody and grace and beauty might have sighed for in vain.  And I always felt that he well described his own eloquence while describing Luther’s, in one of the most admirably moulded sentences he ever achieved,—­“The homely force of Luther, who, in the language of the farm, the shop, the boat, the street, or the nursery, told the high truths that reason or religion taught, and took possession of his audience by a storm of speech, then poured upon them all the riches of his brave plebeian soul, baptizing every head anew,—­a man who with the people seemed more mob than they, and with kings the most imperial man.”

Another key to his strong hold upon the popular mind was to be found in his thorough Americanism of training and sympathy.  Surcharged with European learning, he yet remained at heart the Lexington farmer’s-boy, and his whole atmosphere was indigenous, not exotic.  Not haunted by any of the distrust and over-criticism which are apt to effeminate the American scholar, he plunged deep into the current of hearty national life around him, loved it, trusted it, believed in it; and the combination of this vital faith with such tremendous criticism of public and private sins formed an irresistible power.  He could condemn without crushing,—­denounce mankind, yet save it from despair.  Thus his pulpit became one of the great forces of the nation, like the New York “Tribune.”  His printed volumes had but a limited circulation, owing to a defective system of publication, which his friends tried in vain to correct; but the circulation of his pamphlet-discourses was very great; he issued them faster and faster, latterly often in pairs, and they instantly spread far and wide.  Accordingly he found his listeners everywhere; he could not go so far West but his abundant fame had preceded him; his lecture-room in the remotest places was crowded, and his hotel-chamber also, until late at night.  Probably there was no private man in the nation, except, perhaps, Beecher and Greeley, whom personal strangers were so eager to see; while from a transatlantic direction he was sought by visitors to whom the two other names were utterly unknown.  Learned men from the continent of Europe always found their way, first or last, to Exeter Place; and it is said that Thackeray, on his voyage to this country, declared that the thing in America which he most desired was to hear Theodore Parker talk.