POWER TO DISCERN THE RIGHT.
The power to discern right amid all the wrappings of interest and all the seductions of ambition was singularly his. To choose the lowly for their sake, to abandon all favor, all power, all comfort, all ambition, all greatness--that was his genius and glory. He confronted the spirit of the nation and of the age. I had almost said he set himself against nature, as if he had been a decree of God over-riding all these other insuperable obstacles. That was his function. Mr. Phillips was not called to be a universal orator any more than he was a universal thinker. In literature and in history widely read, in person magnificent, in manners most accomplished, gentle as a babe, sweet as a new-blown rose, in voice clear and silvery, yet he was not a man of tempests, he was not an orchestra of a hundred instruments, he was not an organ, mighty and complex. The nation slept, and God wanted a trumpet, sharp, wide-sounding, narrow and intense; and that was Mr. Phillips. The long-roll is not particularly agreeable in music, or in times of war, but it is better than flutes or harps when men are in a great battle, or are on the point of it. His eloquence was penetrating and alarming. He did not flow as a mighty Gulf Stream; he did not dash upon this continent as the ocean does; he was not a mighty rushing river. His eloquence was a flight of arrows, sentence after sentence polished, and most of them burning. He slung them one after the other, and where they struck they slew. Always elegant, always awful. I think his scorn is and was as fine as I ever knew it in any human being. He had that sublime sanctuary in his pride that made him almost insensitive to what would by other men be considered obloquy. It was as if he said every day in himself: "I am not what they are firing at. I am not there, and I am not that. It is not against me. I am infinitely superior to what they think me to be. They do not know me." It was quiet and unpretentious, but it was there. Conscience and pride were the two concurrent elements of his nature.