thought. He is an intellectual athlete. He thinks for a
dozen men. He does not take time to realize in heart for himself. No
man reads or thinks more than he. But he is greater as a writer than
as a person. There are men who never wrote a line, but whose
influence is deeper and more extensive than that of others who have
written heavy tomes.

"It is too late for Brownson to give himself to contemplation and
interior recollection. He is a controversialist; a doctor. The last
he will be before long. Some have wondered why I should have
contracted such a friendship for one whom they imagine to be so harsh
and dictatorial. I have not felt this. His presence does not change
me; nor do I find myself where I was not after having met him. He has
not the temperament of a genius, but that of a rhetorician and
declaimer. He arrives at his truths by a regular and consecutive
system of logic. His mind is of a historical more than of a poetical
mould.

"As a man, I have never known one so conscientious and
self-sacrificing. This is natural to him. His love of right is
supreme, and the thing he detests most is bad logic. It makes him
peevish and often riles his temper. He defeats, but will never
convince an opponent. This is bad. No one loves to break a lance with
him, because he cuts such ungentlemanly gashes. He is strong, and he
knows it. There is more of the Indian chief than of the Christian
knight in his composition. But he has something of both, though
nothing of the modern scholar, so called. His art is logic, but he
never aims at art. By nature he is a most genuine and true man; none
so much so. By no means E----" [Emerson?] "who ever prates about this
thing. If he attempts embellishment, you see at once it is borrowed;
it is not in his nature. There is a pure and genuine vein of poetry
running through him, but it is not sufficient to tincture the whole
flow of his life. He is a man of the thirteenth or fourteenth century
rather than of the nineteenth. He is an anomaly among its scholars,
writers, and divines. He is not thorough on any one subject though at
home on all. What a finished collegiate education would have done for
him I am baffled to conjecture. He is genuine, and I love him for
that; it is the crown of all virtues. But I must stop. I only
intended to mention that he is here."

The reader may well suppose that Father Hecker fully appreciated
Brownson's literary genius. The English language in his grasp was a