He knew well that a little more or less of rhetoric signified nothing; he was only to say plain and equal things--grand things, if he had them; and if he had them not, only to abstain from saying unfit things--and the whole occasion was answered by his presence.
Hoar reflects on the importance of substance over rhetoric in oratory.
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We speak of a light that makes darkness visible; and similarly there are sounds that deepen the long intervals of silence with which they alternate.
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We are here in the sweet silence of a summer morning, eighteen hundred years after such a scene, and able mentally to catch some glimpse of it; some echo of the storm that has left behind it so ineffaceable a mark.
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