The style of her eloquence was sententious,
free from prettiness, direct, vigorous, charged with vitality.
Articulateness, just emphasis and varied accent, brought out most
delicate shades and brilliant points of meaning, while a rhythmical
collocation of words gave a finished form to every thought. She was
affluent in historic illustration and literary allusion, as well as
in novel hints. She knew how to concentrate into racy phrases the
essential truth gathered from wide research, and distilled with
patient toil; and by skilful treatment she could make green again the
wastes of common-place. Her statements, however rapid, showed breadth
of comprehension, ready memory, impartial judgment, nice analysis of
differences, power of penetrating through surfaces to realities, fixed
regard to central laws and habitual communion with the Life of
life. Critics, indeed, might have been tempted to sneer at a certain
oracular grandiloquence, that bore away her soberness in moments of
elation; though even the most captious must presently have smiled at
the humor of her descriptive touches, her dexterous exposure of
folly and pretension, the swift stroke of her bright wit, her shrewd
discernment, promptitude, and presence of mind.
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