" What gave and
secures for him this singular eminence? To put it in a single word, I
think that his qualities and faculties were in that rare combination
which makes character. This gave _flavor_ to whatever he wrote,--a very
rare quality.
Was he, then, a great poet? Hardly, in the narrowest definition. But he
was a strong thinker who sometimes carried common sense to a height where
it catches the light of a diviner air, and warmed reason till it had
wellnigh the illuminating property of intuition. Certainly he is not,
like Spenser, the poets' poet, but other men have also their rights. Even
the Philistine is a man and a brother, and is entirely right so far as he
sees. To demand more of him is to be unreasonable. And he sees, among
other things, that a man who undertakes to write should first have a
meaning perfectly defined to himself, and then should be able to set it
forth clearly in the best words. This is precisely Dryden's praise,[96]
and amid the rickety sentiment looming big through misty phrase which
marks so much of modern literature, to read him is as bracing as a
northwest wind. He blows the mind clear. In ripeness of mind and bluff
heartiness of expression, he takes rank with the best. His phrase is
always a short-cut to his sense, for his estate was too spacious for him
to need that trick of winding the path of his thought about, and planting
it out with clumps of epithet, by which the landscape-gardeners of
literature give to a paltry half-acre the air of a park.
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