Our tastes were much alike.

Both of us had been educated in music.

He played the piano with intelligence and feeling--especially Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, neither of us ever having quite reached the "high jinks" of Wagner.
To me his oratory was wonderful.

He spoke to an audience of five or ten thousand as he would have talked to a party of three or six.

His style was simple, natural, unstrained; the lucid statement and cogent argument now and again irradiated by a salient passage of satire or a burst of not too eloquent rhetoric.
He was quite knocked out by the nomination of Horace Greeley.