But, whether homely or lofty, whether pathetic or witty, he always talked in dead earnest out of his warm heart, out of his seething brain, and everything was gilded by the magic touch of imagination. “A man,” says Stevens, “who could scarcely speak three sentences, in the pulpit or out of it, without presenting a striking poetic image, a phrase of rare beauty, or a sententious sarcasm, whose discourses presented the strangest, the most brilliant exhibition of sense, epigrammatic thought, pathos, and humor, spangled over by an exhaustless variety of the finest images and pervaded by a spiritual earnestness that subdued all listeners.” “His splendid thoughts come faster than he can speak them,” said Harriet Martineau, “and at times he could be totally overwhelmed by them if a burst of tears, of which he was wholly unconscious, did not aid in his relief.” “I have seen a diamond shining,” said Dr. Bartol, “but he was a diamond on fire.”
3. Sympathy. Here was the secret of his power over men. His emotional nature constantly overflowed all else. With a marvelous intuition in reading character, a free-masonry with all phases of human emotions, a magnetism that put him inside of every heart, he became the better self, the ideal longing of each listener. It made no difference how learned or stoical the man was; Father Taylor got hold of him and stirred his heart from the bottom. A man of wit said, “I am always afraid when I am laughing at Father Taylor’s wit, for I know he will make me cry before he has done with me.” People cry and laugh alternately, and sometimes both together. Laughter is the best preparation for tears. “Man, thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear.” [Are we not all inconsistent, eccentric, at the bottom of our natures, i. e., at our very best?] A New York comedian came to study the method of one of whose acting he had heard much report; he was so affected by the unlearned art of this master of the soul that he fairly blubbered behind his handkerchief.
Dr. Wentworth, of another occasion said: “The immense audience swayed in the wealth of his eloquence like a forest of willows. We laughed, we wept, we shouted in turns; and finally, finding myself getting utterly unmanned, and rapidly dissolving into tears and brine, I fled the pulpit and hid myself out of earshot of this extraordinary scene.”
Dr. Wakely, of New York, describes the effects of a prayer by Father Taylor, at the New York Conference: “The ministers wept all over the house like little children. Dr. Capers and Dr. Pitman were in the pulpit with me. Dr. Capers wept and trembled exceedingly; and Dr. Pitman laughed and cried alternately—smiles and tears strangely blended.”
“His pathos is the most awful of his powers,” said Miss Martineau, terrified at his control over her emotions; “I have seen a single clause of a short sentence call up an instantaneous flush on hundreds of hard faces.”
Many would not expose their hearts to hear him a second time; they could not bear the overmastering power.
Dr. Bartol very finely said: “What was the secret but a sympathy, raised to the highest power, so as to exceed all that we conceive under that name, so that he saw out of people as well as into them! He put on their eyes for his eyeglasses, looking at the world as they did, and they found and felt him in them at the core and center.” “He was a master of pathos,” said Dr. Bellows; “rough sailors and beautiful and cultivated Boston girls, and men like Webster and Emerson, and shop boys and Cambridge students, and Jenny Lind and Charles Dickens, and Harriet Martineau, and everybody of taste or curiosity who visited Boston were seen weeping together with Father Taylor. Ah, the human heart, down at the bottom, is one.”
He loved all little children with all his Master’s passion. The baptism of infants was always a baptism of joy and tears with him. He would gather one to his breast and kiss and croon over it like a mother. Taking a beautiful little girl in his arms, he raised her before the whole audience, and said, with streaming eyes, “Look at the sweet lamb! Her mother has brought her to Christ’s fold. A baptism of heaven be on thee, my pretty dove.” All children recognized him at sight for one of their guild. A ragged little girl walked into the church at his funeral, laid a buttonhole bouquet on the coffin, and said timidly and sweetly, “He was my friend,” and so departed. Once when he had been called to several children’s funerals in succession, he said to a friend whom he met in the street, “There is something wrong somewhere. There are storms brewing when so many doves are flying aloft.”
At funerals he was a refuge of consolation. He so entered into the hearts bereaved that he felt their hurt. “Father, look upon us,” he once implored, with mighty and tender supplication, “we are a widow!” “It is no wonder to me,” said Harriet Martineau, “that the widow and orphan are cherished by those who hear his prayers for them.”