e, one side of all ingredient or ground of
nature. But we shall know that poetry is the real and true state
of man; the proper and last ideal of souls, the free beauty they
long for, and the rhythmic flow of that universal play in which
all life would live."

The key to Dr. Bushnell is to be found in this passage, and it is safe
to say of him that in hardly a page of a dozen volumes is he false to
it. He is always a poet, singing out of "the pure inspiration of truth
and charity," and keeping ever in mind that poetry and rhythm are not
figments outside of nature, but the real and true state of man and the
proper and last ideal of souls.

The centrality of this thought is seen in his style. It is a remarkable
style, and is only to be appreciated when the man is understood. It is
made up of long sentences full of qualifying phrases until the thought
is carved into perfect exactness; or--changing the figure--shade upon
shade is added until the picture and conception are alike. But with all
this piling up of phrases, he not only did not lose proportion and
rhythm, but so set down his words that they read like a chant and sound
like the breaking of waves upon the beach. Nor does he ever part with
poetry in the high sense in which he conceived it. I will not compare
his style, as to merit, with that of Milton and Jeremy Taylor and Sir
Thomas Browne, but he belongs to their class; he has the same majestic
swing, and like them he cannot forbear singing, whatever he may have to
say. His theme may be roads, or city plans, or agriculture, or
emigration, or the growth of law; yet he never fails of lifting his
subject into that higher world of the imagination where the real truth
of the subject is to be found, and is made to appear as poetry. It would
be unjust to identify him so thoroughly with the poets if it should lead
to the thought that he was not a close and rigorous thinker. It should
not be forgotten that all great prose-writers, from Plato down to
Carlyle and Emerson, stand outside of poetry only by virtue of their
form and not by virtue of their thought; indeed, poet and thinker are
interchangeable names. Dr. Bushnell wrote chiefly on theology, and the
value and efficacy of his writings lie in the fact that imagination and
fact, thought and sentiment, reason and feeling, are each preserved and
yet so mingled as to make a single impression.

This combination of two realms or habits of thought appears on e