re, such as Paradise Lost, and the Book of Job,
Burke, Dr. Johnson, and the Sixth Book of the Aeneid. Homer he never
cared much for,--nor, indeed, anything Greek. He hated, he loathed,
the act of writing. Billiards, ten-pins, chess, draughts, whist, he
never relished, though fond to excess of out-door pleasures, like
hunting, fishing, yachting. He liked to be alone with great
Nature,--alone in the giant woods or on the shores of the resounding
sea,--alone all day with his gun, his dog, and his thoughts,---alone
in the morning, before any one was astir but himself, looking out upon
the sea and the glorious sunrise. What a delicious picture of this
large, healthy Son of Earth Mr. Lanman gives us, where he describes
him coming into his bedroom, at sunrise, and startling him out of a
deep sleep by shouting, "Awake, sluggard! and look upon this glorious
scene, for the sky and the ocean are enveloped in flames!" He was akin
to all large, slow things in nature. A herd of fine cattle gave him a
keen, an inexhaustible enjoyment; but he never "tasted" a horse: he
had no horse enthusiasm. In England he chiefly enjoyed these five
things, the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Smithfield Cattle
Market, English farming, and Sir Robert Peel. Sir Robert Peel he
thought was "head and shoulders above any other man" he had ever met.
He greatly excelled, too, in describing immense things. In speaking of
the Pyramids, once, he asked,

"Who can inform us by what now unknown machines mass was
thus aggregated, to mass, and quarry piled on quarry, till
solid granite seemed to cover the earth and reach the
skies."

His peculiar love of the Union of these States was partly due,
perhaps, to this habit of his mind of dwelling with complacency on
vastness. He felt that he wanted and required a continent to live in:
his mind would have gasped for breath in New Hampshire.

But this enormous creature was not an exception to the law which
renders giants harmless by seaming them with weakness, but for which
the giants would possess the earth. If he had been completed
throughout on the plan on which he was sketched, if he had been as
able to originate as he was powerful to state, if he had possessed
will proportioned to his strength, moral power equal to his moral
feeling, intellect on a par with his genius, and principle worthy of
his intellect, he would have subjugated mankind, and raised his
country to a point from which it wou