course this implies that our meeting is partial. I present
to him the many forms of nature and solicit with music; he
melts them all into spirit and reproves performance with
prayer. When I am with God alone, I adore in silence. With
nature I am filled and grow only. With most men I bring words
of now past life, and do actions suggested by the wants of
their natures rather than my own. But he stops me from doing
anything, and makes me think.'

* * * * *

_October_, 1842 * * To me, individually, Dr. Channing's
kindness was great; his trust and esteem were steady, though
limited, and I owe him a large debt of gratitude.

'His private character was gentle, simple, and perfectly
harmonious, though somewhat rigid and restricted in its
operations. It was easy to love, and a happiness to know him,
though never, I think, a source of the highest social pleasure
to be with him. His department was ethics; and as a literary
companion, he did not throw himself heartily into the works of
creative genius, but looked, wherever he read, for a moral. In
criticism he was deficient in "individuality," if by that
the phrenologists mean the power of seizing on the peculiar
meanings of special forms. I have heard it said, that, under
changed conditions, he might have been a poet. He had, indeed,
the poetic sense of a creative spirit working everywhere. Man
and nature were living to him; and though he did not yield to
sentiment in particulars he did in universals. But his mind
was not recreative, or even representative.

'He was deeply interesting to me as having so true a respect
for woman. This feeling in him was not chivalrous; it was not
the sentiment of an artist; it was not the affectionateness of
the common son of Adam, who knows that only her presence can
mitigate his loneliness; but it was a religious reverence. To
him she was a soul with an immortal destiny. Nor was there at
the bottom of his heart one grain of masculine assumption. He
did not wish that Man should protect her, but that God should
protect her and teach her the meaning of her lot.

'In his public relations he is to be regarded not only as a
check upon the evil tendencies of his era, but yet more as a
prophet of a better age already dawning as he leaves us. In
his later days he fill