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cannot tell. He was, however, although a vehement and irritable, a very polite man; and, like Dr. Johnson, he "loved to fold his legs, and have his talk out." Many of his visitors, too, were really distinguished men, and were sure, when they returned home, to circulate his repartees, and spread abroad his fame. Hence, even in the forenoons, he sometimes said brilliant things, many of which have been diligently collected by the late excellent Dr. Balmer and others, and are to be found in his memoirs.

Judging by these specimens, our impression of his conversational powers is distinct and decided. His talk was always rapid, ready, clear, and pointed-often brilliant, not unfrequently wild and daring. He said more good and memorable things in the course of an evening than perhaps any talker of his day. To the power of his talk it contributed that his state of body required constant stimulus. Owing to a pain in his spine, he was obliged to swallow daily great quantities of ether and laudanum, not to speak of his favorite potion, tea. This had the effect of keeping him strung up always to the highest pitch; and, while never intoxicated, he was everlastingly excited. Had he been a feebler man in body and mind, the regimen would have totally unnerved him. As it was, it added greatly to the natural brilliance of his conversational powers, although sometimes it appears to have irritated his temper, and to have provoked ebullitions of passion and hasty, unguarded statement. It was in such moods that he used to abuse Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Pollok, and Edward Irving. He often, too, talked for effect; and his judgments were sometimes exceedingly capricious and self-contradictory. Society was essential to him. It relieved that "permanent shade of gloom" which the acute eye of Foster saw lying on his soul. He rushed to it as into his native air; and, once there, he sometimes talked for victory and display, and often on subjects with which he was very imperfectly acquainted. We cannot wonder that, when he met on one occasion with Coleridge, they did not take to each other. Both had been accustomed to lead in conversation; and, like two suns in one sky, they began to "fight in their courses," and made the atmosphere too hot to hold them. Coleridge, although not so ready, rapid, and sharp, was far profounder, wider, and more

suggestive in his conversation. Hall's talk, like his style, consisted of rather short, pointed, and balanced periods.Coleridge talked, as he wrote, in long, linked, melodious, and flowing, but somewhat rambling and obscure paragraphs. The one talked; the other lectured. The one was a lively, sparkling stream; the other a great, slow, broad, and lipful river.

A gentleman in Bradford described to us a day he once spent there with Hall. It was a day of much enjoyment and excitement. At the close of it Hall felt exceedingly exhausted; and, ere retiring to rest, asked the landlady for a wineglass half-full of brandy. "Now," he says, "I am about to take as much laudanum as would kill all this company; for if I don't, I won't sleep one moment." He filled the glass with strong laudanum; went to bed; enjoyed a refreshing rest; and came down to breakfast the next morning "the most majestic-looking man our informant ever saw; his brow calm and grand; his eye bright; his air serene; and his step and port like those of a superior being, condescending to touch this gross planet. He described his conversation as worthy of his presence-the richest and most sparkling essence he ever imbibed withal. Yet his face was far from being a handsome one. Indeed, it reminded some people of an exaggerated frog's. But the amplitude of his forehead, the brilliance of his eye, and the strength and breadth of his chest, marked him out always from the roll of common men, and added greatly to the momentum both of his conversation and his preaching.

His preaching has been frequently described, but generally by those who heard him in the decline of his powers. It came to a climax in Cambridge, and was never so powerful after his derangement. To have heard him in Cambridge, must have been a treat almost unrivalled in the history of pulpit-oratory. In the prime of youth and youthful strength, "hope still rising before him, like a fiery column, the dark side not yet turned," his fancy exuberant; his language less select, pcrhaps, but more energetic and abundant than in later days; full of faith without fanaticism, and of ardor without excess of enthusiasm; with an eye like a coal of fire; a figure, strong, erect, and not yet encumbered with corpulence; a voice not loud, but sweet, and which ever and anon "trem

bled" below his glorious sentences and images, and an utterance rapid as a mountain torrent-did this young apostle stand up, and, to an audience as refined and intellectual as could then be assembled in England, "preach Christ and him crucified." Sentence followed sentence, each more brilliant than its forerunner, like Venus succeeding Jupiter in the sky, and Luna drowning Venus; shiver after shiver of delight followed each other through the souls of the hearers, till they wondered "whereunto this thing should grow," and whether they were in the body or out of the body they could hardly tell. To use the fine words of John Scott, "he unveiled the mighty foundations of the Rock of Ages, and made their hearts vibrate with a strange joy, which they shall recognize in loftier stages of their existence." What a pity that, with the exception of his sermon on Modern Infidelity, all these Cambridge discourses have irrecoverably perished."

This, however, like Chalmers's similar splendid career in the Tron Church, Glasgow, could not last for ever. Hall became over-excited, perhaps over-elated, and his majestic mind departed from men for a season. When he "came back to us," much of his power and eloquence was gone. His joy of being, too,

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was lessened. He became a sadder and a wiser man. longer rushed exulting to the pulpit, as the horse to the battle. He "spake trembling in Israel." He had, in his derangement, got a glimpse of the dark mysteries of existence, and was humbled in the dust under the recollection of it. He had met, too, with some bitter disappointments. His love to a most accomplished and beautiful woman was not returned. Fierce spasms of agony ran ever and anon through his body. The terrible disease of madness continued to hang over him all his life long, like the sword of Damocles, by a single hair. All this contributed to soften and also somewhat to weaken his spirit. His preaching became the mild sunset of what it had been. The power, richness, and fervor of his ancient style were for ever gone.

We have heard his later mode of preaching often described by eye-witnesses. He began in a low tone of voice; as he proceeded his voice rose and his rapidity increased; the two first thirds of his sermon consisted of statement or argument; when he neared the close, he commenced a strain of appeal

and then, and not till then, was there any eloquence; then his stature erected itself, his voice swelled to its utmost compass, his rapidity became prodigious, and his practical questionspoured out in thick succession--seemed to sound the very souls of his audience. Next to the impressiveness of the conclusion, what struck a stranger most was the exquisite beauty and balance of his sentences; every one of which seemed quite worthy of, and ready for, the press. Sometimes, indeed, he was the tamest and most commonplace of preachers, and men left the church wondering if this were actually the illustrious man.

His Sermons, in their printed form, next demand our consideration. Their merits, we think, have been somewhat exaggerated hitherto, and are likely, in the coming age, to be rated too low. It cannot be fairly maintained that they exhibit a great native original mind like Foster's, or that they are full, as a whole, of rich suggestive thought. The thinking in them is never mere commonplace; but it never rises into rare and creative originality. In general, he aims only at the elegant and the beautiful, and is seldom sublime. He is not the Moses, or the Milton, or the Young-only the Pope, of preachers. Like Pope, his forte is refined sense, expressed in exquisite language. In conversation, he often ventured on daring flights, but seldom in his writings. While reading them, so cool is the strain of thought-so measured the writing-so perfect the self-command-so harmoniously do the various faculties of the writer work together-that you are tempted to ask, How could the author of this ever have been mad ?

We are far from wishing, by such remarks, to derogate from the merit of these remarkable compositions. For, if not crowded with thought or copious in imagination, and if somewhat stiff, stately, and monotonous in style, they are at once very masculine in thinking, and very elegant in language. If he seldom reaches the sublime, he never condescends to the pretty, or even the neat. He is always graceful, if not often grand. A certain sober dignity distinguishes all his march, and now and then he trembles into touches of pathos or elevated sentiment, which are as felicitous as they are delicate. Some of the fragments he has left behind him discover, we

think, more of the strong, bold conception, and the vis vivido, of genius, than his more polished and elaborate productions. Such are his two Sermons on the Divine Concealment. But in all his works you see a mind which had ventured too far and had overstrained its energies in early manhood, and which had come back to cower timidly in its native nest.

It were wasting time to dwell on sermons so well-known as those of Hall. We prefer that on the death of Dr. Ryland, as more characteristic of his distinguishing qualities of dignified sentiment, graceful pathos, and calm, majestic eloquence. In his "Infidelity," and "War," and the "Present Crisis, he grapples with subjects unsuited, on the whole, to his genius, and becomes almost necessarily an imitator, particularly of Burke-whose mind possessed all those qualities of origination, power over the terrible, and boundless fertility in which Hall's was deficient. But in Ryland you have himself; and we fearlessly pronounce that sermon the most classical and beautiful strain of pulpit eloquence in the English language.

Hall as a thinker never had much power over the age, and that seems entirely departed. Even as a writer he is not now so much admired. The age is getting tired of measured periods, and is preferring a more conversational and varied style. He has founded no school, and left few stings in the hearts of his hearers. Few have learned much from him. Yet as specimens of pure English, expressing evangelical truth in musical cadence, his sermons and essays have their own place, and it is a high one, among the classical writings of the age.

Hall, as we have intimated, had a lofty mein, and was thought by many, particularly in a first interview, rather arrogant and overbearing. But this was only the hard outside shell of his manner; beneath there were profound humility, warm affections, and childlike piety. He said that he "enjoyed everything." But this capacity of keen enjoyment was, as often in other cases, linked to a sensitiveness and morbid acuteness of feeling, which made him at times very melancholy. He was, like all thinkers, greatly perplexed by the mysteries of existence, and grieved at the spectacles of sin and misery in this dark valley of tears. He was like an angel, who had lost his way from heaven, and his wings with it, and who was looking perpetually upwards with a sigh, and longing to re

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