Oratory Sacred and Secular: Or, The Extemporaneous Speaker, with Sketches of the Most Eminent Speakers of All Ages |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
50 cents advantage amendment ANDREW COMBE arrange assembly audience beauty become Beecher called chairman character church command committee congregation cultivated debate Demosthenes discourse earnest effect effort Elihu Burritt eloquence emotion Exordiums expression extemporaneous extempore speaker facts faculty feeling genius GEORGE COMBE give hearers heart Henry Clay Henry Ward Beecher human ideas illustration imagination improved intellectual knowledge labor language lecture living Lord Brougham manner matter means meeting memory ment mental method mighty mind minister motion Muslin nature necessary never object once orator oratory passed persons Phrenology Physiognomy possessed practice prayer preacher preaching preparation present pulpit question recited requires rule scarcely sentences sermon sketch sometimes soon soul speak speech spirit spoken success SYLVESTER GRAHAM thought tion tone truth uncon utter voice vote Warren Hastings Whitefield whole wonderful words writing
Popular passages
Page 146 - The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail — its roof may shake — the wind may blow through it — the storm may enter — the rain may enter — but the King of England cannot enter ! — all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement...
Page 151 - There is one thing, and one thing only, which defies all mutation ; that which existed before the world, and will survive the fabric of the world itself; I mean justice ; that justice, which, emanating from the Divinity, has a place in the breast of every one of us, given us for our guide with regard to ourselves and with regard to others, and which will stand after this globe is burned to ashes, our advocate or our accuser before the great Judge, when He comes to call upon us for the tenor of a...
Page 175 - These off-hand efforts were made sometimes in a cornfield, at others in the forest, and not unfrequently in some distant barn, with the horse and ox for my auditors.
Page 172 - It is an awful moment when the soul begins to find that the props on which it has blindly rested so long are many of them rotten, and begins to suspect them all ; when it begins to feel the nothingness of many of the traditionary opinions which have been received with implicit confidence, and in that horrible insecurity begins also to doubt whether there be anything to believe at all.
Page 221 - CONSTITUTION OF MAN, Considered in RELATION TO EXTERNAL OBJECTS. By George Combe. The only authorized American Edition. With Twenty Engravings, and a Portrait of the Author.
Page 168 - It is only by the fresh feelings of the heart that mankind can be very powerfully affected. What can be more ludicrous than an orator delivering stale indignation, and...
Page 146 - Parliament, was strikingly graceful and commanding, his features high and noble, his eye full of fire. His voice, even when it sank to a whisper, was heard to the remotest benches ; when he strained it to its full extent, the sound rose like the swell of the organ of a great cathedral, shook the house with its peal, and was heard through lobbies and down staircases, to the Court of Requests and the precincts of Westminster Hull.
Page 152 - Nature had bestowed on him a boundless imagination, aided by a memory of equal strength and tenacity. His fancy was so vivid that it seemed to light up by its own powers, and to burn without consuming the aliment on which it fed...