ot traceable. His freshness
of mental vision, the strikingly novel points of view from which he
looked at every subject, was marvelous even in a century so fertile of
varied independences: he complained that "the most galling of yokes is
the tyranny of your next-door neighbor," the obligation of thinking as
he thinks. He had a keen, almost reckless wit and delicious buoyant
humor, whose utterances never pall by repetition; few authors so abound
in tenaciously quotable phrases and passages of humorous
intellectuality. What is rarely found in connection with much humor, he
had a sensitive dreaminess of nature, strongly poetic in feeling, whence
resulted a large appreciation of the subtler classes of poetry; of which
he was an acute and sympathizing critic. As part of this temperament, he
had a strong bent toward mysticism,--in one essay he says flatly that
"mysticism is true,"--which gave him a rare insight into the religious
nature and some obscure problems of religious history; though he was too
cool, scientific, and humorous to be a great theologian.

Above all, he had that instinct of selective art, in felicity of words
and salience of ideas, which elevates writing into literature; which
long after a thought has merged its being and use in those of wider
scope, keeps it in separate remembrance and retains for its creator his
due of credit through the artistic charm of the shape he gave it.

The result of a mixture of traits popularly thought incompatible, and
usually so in reality,--a great relish for the driest business facts and
a creative literary gift,--was absolutely unique. Bagehot explains the
general sterility of literature as a guide to life by the fact that "so
few people who can write know anything;" and began a reform in his own
person, by applying all his highest faculties--the best not only of his
thought but of his imagination and his literary skill--to the theme of
his daily work, banking and business affairs and political economy.
There have been many men of letters who were excellent business men and
hard bargainers, sometimes indeed merchants or bankers, but they have
held their literature as far as possible off the plane of their
bread-winning; they have not used it to explain and decorate the latter
and made that the motive of art. Bagehot loved business not alone as the
born trader loves it, for its profit and its gratification of innate
likings,--"business is really pleasanter than pleasure, tho