The effect was overwhelming. We happened, in leaving the church, to pass near the orator, and were greatly struck with the rapt look of his face "The wind was down, but still the sea ran high." A certain pallid gleann had succeeded the flushed ardor of his appearance in the pulpit. It was, the last time we were ever to gaze on the strange, coarse, but most powerful and meaning countenance of Dr. Chalmers. And yet when, years later, we saw Duncan's picture of him, he seemed still alive before.us. The leonine massiveness of the head, body, and brow-the majestic repose of the attitude the eye withdrawn upwards into a deep happy dreamthe air of simple homely grandeur about the whole person and, bearing-were all those of Chalmers, and combined to prove him next, perhaps, to Wilson, the Genius of Scotlandthe hirsute Forest-God of a rugged but true-hearted land.,. It was this air of unshorn power which marked him out from all his ecclesiastical contemporaries, and contributed in some measure to his popularity, Scotland-" the land of mountain and of flood"--loves that her idols shall be large and shaggy. Think of her worship of the rough John Knox of the stalwart sons of the Covenant--of Burns and Wilson, the two tameless spirits!--and of her own homely, all-reflecting, and simple Sir Walter Scott. What cares she, in comparison with these, for her polished Robertsons and Jeffreys? It is well remarked by Jeffreys, in vindicating the Scottish language from the charge of vulgarity, that it is not the language of a province, like Yorkshire, but of an ancient and independent kingdom. So Chalmers's peculiarities and roughness of speech were those of the ancient "kingdom of Fife" and in his "whuches," and his fulthies," and his bad quantities, after the first blush there was found a strange antique charm-they were of the earth, earthy, and suited the stout aboriginal character of the man, His roughness was but the rough grating of the wheels of the huge and wealthy wain, as it moved homewards over a rocky road, amid the autumn twilight, and told of rude plenty and of massive power. The effects of his eloquence have been often described.Many orators have produced more cheers, and shone more in brilliant individual points: Chalmers's power lay in pressing on his whole audience before him, through the sheer momentum of genius and enthusiasm. He treated his hearers as constituting "one mind," and was himself "one strength," urging it, like a vast stone, upwards. In this he very seldom failed. He might not always convince the understandings he often offended the tastes; but, unlike Sisyphus, he pushed his stone to the summit-he secured at least a temporary triumph. This he gained greatly from the intensity of his views, as well as from the earnestness of his temperament, and the splendor of his genius. He had strong, clear, angular, although often one-sided and mistaken, notions on the subjects he touched; and these, by incessant reiteration, by endless turning round, by dint of dauntless furrowing, he succeeded in ploughing into the minds of his hearers. Or it seemed a process of stamping; "I must press such and such a truth on them, whether they hear or forbear. I shall stamp on till it is fixed undeniably and for ever upon their minds." Add to this the unconsciousness of himself. He never seemed, at least, to be thinking about himself, nor very much of his hearers. He was occupied entirely with those "big bulking" ideas. of which he was the mere organ, and he taught his audience to think of them principally too. How grand it was to witness a strong and gifted man transfigured into the mere medium of an idea!-his whole body so filled with its light that you seemed to see it shining through him, as through a transparent vase! His imagination was a quality in him of which much nonsense used to be said. It was now made his only faculty, and now it was described as of the Shakspeare or Jeremy Taylor order. In fact, it was not by any means even his highest power. Strong, broad, Baconian logic was his leading faculty; and he had, besides, a boundless command of a certain order of language, as well as all the burning sympathies and energies of the orator. Taking him all in all, he was unquestionably a man of lofty genius; but it very seldom assumed the truly poetic form, and was rather warm than rich. Power of illustration he possessed in plenty; but in curiosa felicitas, short, compact, hurrying strokes as of lightning, and that fiue sudden imagery in which strong and beautiful thought so na turally incarnates itself, he was rather deficient. He was, consequently, one of our least terse and quotable authors.-Few sentences, collecting in themselves the results of long trains of thinking, in a new and sparkling form-like "apples of gold in a network of silver"-are to be found in his writings. Nor do they abound in bare, strong aphorisms. Let those who would see his deficiency in this respect compare him, not with the Jeremy Taylors, Barrows, and Donnes, merely, but with the Burkes, Hazlitts, and Coleridges of a later day, and they will understand our meaning. His writings remind you rather of the sublime diffusiveness of a Paul, than of the deep, solitary, and splendid dicta of the great Preacher-King of ancient Israel. A classic author he is not, and never can become. From this destiny, his Scotticisms, vulgarities, and new combinations of sounds and words, do not necessarily exclude him; but his merits (as a MERE LITERARY man) do not counterbalance his defects. The power of the works, in fact, was not equal to the power of the man. He always, indeed, threw his heart, but not always his artistic consciousness, into what he wrote. Hence he is generally "rude in speech, although not in knowledge." His utterance is never confused, but is often hampered, as of one speaking in a foreign tongue. This sometimes adds to the effect of his written composition-it often added amazingly to the force of those extempore harangues he was in the habit of uttering, amid the intervals of his lectures, to his students. Those stammerings, strugglings, repetitions, risings from and sittings down into his chair-often, however, coming to some fiery burst, or culminating in some rapid and victorious climax--reminded you of Wordsworth's lines: "So have I, not unmoved in mind, :- You liked to see this strong-winged bird of the storm matching his might against it--now soaring up to overcome it--now sinking down to undermine it--now screaming aloud in its teeth-now half-choked in the gust of its fury--but always moving onwards, and sometimes riding triumphant on its changed or subjugated billow! But all this did not (except to those who had witnessed the phenomenon) tend to increase the artistic merit or permanent effect of his works. m: No oratory can be printed entire. Every speaker, who is not absolutely dull and phlegmatic, says something far more through his tones, or eye, or gestures, than his bare words can tell. But this is more the case with some than with others. About the speaking of Whitfield there was a glare of shall we say vulgar?--earnestness, which, along with his theatrical, but transcendent elocution, lives only in tradition. It was the same with Kirwan, a far more commonplace man. Struthers, a Relief minister in Edinburgh, at the beginning of this century, seems to have possessed the same incommunicable power, and his sermon, on the battle of Trafalgar lives as a miraculous memory on the minds of a few-and nowhere else. The late Dr. Heugh, of Glasgow, possessed a Canning-like head, as well as a certain copperplate charm in his address, which have not, as they could not, be transferred to his printed sermons. And so, in perhaps a still larger degree, with Dr. Chalmers; the difference being, that while in the others the manner seemed to fall out from the man, like a gay but becoming garment, in Chalmers it was wrapped. convulsively around him, like the mantle of a dying Cæsar. It is but his naked body that, we now behold. Finer still it was, we have been told, to come in suddenly upon the inspired man in his study, when the full heat of his thought had kindled up his being into a flame-when, in concert with the large winter fire blazing beside him, his eye was flaming and speaking to itself-his brow flushing like a cloud in is solitude-his form moving like that of a Pythoness on her stool and now and then his voice bursting silence, and showing that, as often in the church he seemed to fancy himself in solitude, so, often in solitude, he thought himself thundering in the church.. Those who saw him in such moods had come into the forge of the Cyclops; and yet so far was he from being disturbed or angry, he would rise and salute them with perfect politeness, and even kindliness; but they were the politeness, and kindliness of one who had been interrupted while forming a two-edged sword for Mars, or carving another figure upon the shield of Achilles. It is curious, entering in spirit into the studies or retirements of great authors, in the past or the present, and watching their various kinds and degrees of excitement while com- ! posing their productions. We see a number of interesting figures-Homer, with his sightless eyes, but ears preternaturally open, rhapsodizing to the many-sounding sea his immortal harmonies Eschylus, so agitated (according to tradition) while framing his terrible dialogues and choruses, that he might have been mistaken for his own Orestes pursued by the Furies Dante, stern, calm, silent, yet with a fierce glance at times from his hollow eye, and a convulsive movement in" his tiger-like lower jaw, telling of the furor that was boiling within Shakspeare, serene even over his tragic, and smiling a gentle smile over his comic, creations Scott, preserving, alike in depicting the siege of Torquilstone, the humors of Caleb Balderstone, and the end of the family of Ravenswood, the same gruff yet good-natured equanimity of countenanceByron, now scowling a fierce scowl over his picture of a ship! wreck, and now grinning a ghastly smile while dedicating his "Don Juan" to Southey-Shelley, wearing on his fine features a look of perturbation and wonder, as of a cherub only half fallen, and not yet at home in his blasphemous attitude of opposition: to the Most High Wordsworth, murmuring a solemn music over the slowly-filling page of "Ruth," or the "Eelipse in Italy" Coleridge, nearly asleep, and dreaming over his own gorgeous creations, like a drowsy bee in a heather bloom→→→ Wilson, as Hogg describes him, when they sat down to write verses in neighboring rooms, howeling out his enthusiasm (and when he came to this pitch, poor Hogg uniformly felt himself vanquished, and threw down his pen!)-or, in fine, Chalmers, as aforesaid, agonizing in the sweat of his great intellectual travail !ip ent A We have spoken of Chalmers as possessed of an idea which drowned his personal feelings, and pressed all his powers into one focus. This varied, of course, very much at different stages of his history. It was, at first, that of a purely scientiffe theism. He believed in God as a dry demonstrated fact, which he neither trembled at nor loved whose personality hơgranted, but scarcely seems to have felt. From this he pass ed to a more decided form of belief, worship, and love for the " |