)
On through for months and years to '73 I saw and talk'd with O'C.
almost daily. I had soon got employment, first for a short time in the
Indian Bureau (in the Interior Department,) and then for a long while
in the Attorney General's Office. The secession war, with its tide of
varying fortunes, excitements--President Lincoln and the daily sight
of him--the doings in Congress and at the State Capitols--the news
from the fields and campaigns, and from foreign governments--my visits
to the Army Hospitals, daily and nightly, soon absorbing everything
else,--with a hundred matters, occurrences, personalties,--(Greeley,
Wendell Phillips, the parties, the Abolitionists, &c.)--were the
subjects of our talk and discussion. I am not sure from what I heard
then, but O'C. was cut out for a first-class public speaker or
forensic advocate. No audience or jury could have stood out against
him. He had a strange charm of physiologic voice. He had a power and
sharp-cut faculty of statement and persuasiveness beyond any man's
else. I know it well, for I have felt it many a time. If not as
orator, his forte was as critic, newer, deeper than any: also, as
literary author. One of his traits was that while he knew all, and
welcom'd all sorts of great _genre_ literature, all lands and times,
from all writers and artists, and not only tolerated each,
and defended every attack'd literary person with a skill or
heart-catholicism that I never saw equal'd--invariably advocated and
excused them--he kept an idiosyncrasy and identity of his own very
mark'd, and without special tinge or undue color from any source.
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