. There is _a strange earnestness in his
worship of beauty_, which throws a charm over his impassioned
song, more easily felt than described, and not to be escaped by
those who have once felt it. We think that he has _more
definiteness and roundness of general conception_ than the late
Mr. Keats, and is much more free from blemishes of diction and
hasty capriccios of fancy.... The author imitates nobody; _we
recognize the spirit of his age, but not the individual form of
this or that writer_. His thoughts bear no more resemblance to
Byron or Scott, Shelley or Coleridge, than to Homer or Calderon,
Ferdusi or Calidasa. We have remarked five distinctive
excellencies of his own manner. First, his luxuriance of
imagination, and at the same time his control over it. Secondly,
his power of embodying himself in ideal characters, or rather
modes of character, with such extreme accuracy of adjustment,
that the circumstances of the narration seem to have a natural
correspondence with the predominant feeling, and, as it were, to
be evolved from it by assimilative force. Thirdly, his vivid,
picturesque delineation of objects, and the peculiar skill with
which he holds all of them _fused_, to borrow a metaphor from
science, in a medium of strong emotion. Fourthly, the variety of
his lyrical measures, and exquisite modulation of harmonious
words and cadences to the swell and fall of the feelings
expressed. Fifthly, the elevated habits of thought, implied in
these compositions, and imparting a mellow soberness of tone,
more impressive, to our minds, than if the author had drawn up a
set of opinions in verse, and sought to instruct the
understanding, _rather than to communicate the love of beauty to
the heart_."

What follows is justly thought and well said.

"And is it not a noble thing, that the English tongue is, as it
were, the common focus and point of union to which opposite
beauties converge? Is it a trifle that we temper energy with
softness, strength with flexibility, capaciousness of sound with
pliancy of idiom? Some, I know, insensible to these virtues, and
ambitious of I know not what unattainable decomposition, prefer
to utter funeral praises over the grave of departed Anglo-Saxon,
or, starting with convulsive shudder, are ready to leap from
surrounding Latinisms into the kin