t home, and minding his own affairs. Perhaps a little
over-confident sometimes, and stiffly individual, dropping society clean
out of his theories, while standing friendly in his strict sense of
friendship, there is in him an integrity and sense of justice that make
possible and actual the virtues of Sparta and the Stoics, and all the
more welcome to us in these times of shuffling and of pusillanimity.
Plutarch would have made him immortal in his pages, had he lived before
his day. Nor have we any so modern as be,--his own and ours; too purely
so to be appreciated at once. A scholar by birthright, and an author,
his fame has not yet travelled far from the banks of the rivers he has
described in his books; but I hazard only the truth in affirming of his
prose, that in substance and sense it surpasses that of any naturalist
of his time, and that he is sure of a reading in the future. There are
fairer fishes in his pages than any now swimming in our streams, and
some sleep of his on the banks of the Merrimack by moonlight that Egypt
never rivalled; a morning of which Memnon might have envied the music,
and a greyhound that was meant for Adonis; some frogs, too, better than
any of Aristophanes. Perhaps we have had no eyes like his since Pliny's
time. His senses seem double, giving him access to secrets not easily
read by other men: his sagacity resembling that of the beaver and the
bee, the dog and the deer; an instinct for seeing and judging, as by
some other or seventh sense, dealing with objects as if they were
shooting forth from his own mind mythologically, thus completing Nature
all round to his senses, and a creation of his at the moment. I am sure
he knows the animals, one by one, and everything else knowable in our
town, and has named them rightly as Adam did in Paradise, if he be
not that ancestor himself. His works are pieces of exquisite sense,
celebrations of Nature's virginity, exemplified by rare learning and
original observations. Persistently independent and manly, he criticizes
men and times largely, urging and defending his opinions with the spirit
and pertinacity befitting a descendant of him of the Hammer. A head
of mixed genealogy like his, Franco-Norman crossed by Scottish and
New-England descent, may be forgiven a few characteristic peculiarities
and trenchant traits of thinking, amidst his great common sense and
fidelity to the core of natural things. Seldom has a head circumscribed
so much of the sen