has seen and seized before us: and we shall
at last cease the investigation, with a well-grounded trust, that
whatever we have been unable to account for, and what we still dislike
in his works, has reason for it, and foundation like the rest; and that
even where he has failed or erred, there is a beauty in the failure
which none are able to equal, and a dignity in the error which none are
worthy to reprove.

Sec. 7. His former rank and progress.

Sec. 8. Standing of his present works. Their mystery is the consequence of
their fullness.

There has been marked and constant progress in his mind; he has not,
like some few artists, been without childhood; his course of study has
been as evidently as it has been swiftly progressive, and in different
stages of the struggle, sometimes one order of truth, sometimes another,
has been aimed at or omitted. But from the beginning to the present
height of his career, he has never sacrificed a greater truth to a
less. As he advanced, the previous knowledge or attainment was absorbed
in what succeeded, or abandoned only if incompatible, and never
abandoned without a gain; and his present works present the sum and
perfection of his accumulated knowledge, delivered with the impatience
and passion of one who feels too much, and knows too much, and has too
little time to say it in, to pause for expression, or ponder over his
syllables. There is in them the obscurity, but the truth, of prophecy;
the instinctive and burning language, which would express less if it
uttered more, which is indistinct only by its fulness, and dark with its
abundant meaning. He feels now, with long-trained vividness and keenness
of sense, too bitterly the impotence of the hand, and the vainness of
the color to catch one shadow or one image of the glory which God has
revealed to him. He has dwelt and communed with nature all the days of
his life; he knows her now too well, he cannot palter over the material
littleness of her outward form; he must give her soul, or he has done
nothing, and he cannot do this with the flax, and the earth, and the
oil. "I cannot gather the sunbeams out of the east, or I would make
_them_ tell you what I have seen; but read this, and interpret this, and
let us remember together. I cannot gather the gloom out of the
night-sky, or I would make that teach you what I have seen; but read
this, and interpret this, and let us feel together. And if you have not
that within you whi