constitution powerfully contributed. The sensuous element was
singularly deficient in his nature. He never seems to have passed
through that erotic period out of which some poets have never emerged.
A soaring, speculative imagination, and an impetuous, resistless
self-will, were his distinguishing characteristics. From first to last
he concentrated himself within himself; brooding over his own fancies
and imaginations to the comparative disregard of the incidents and
impressions which suggested them; and was little susceptible of ideas
originating in other minds. We behold the result. He lives alone in a
world of mountains, streams, and atmospheric phenomena, dealing with
moral abstractions, and rarely encountered by even shadowy specters
of beings outwardly resembling himself. There is measureless grandeur
and power in his moral speculations. There is intense reality in
his pictures of external nature. But though his human characters are
presented with great skill of metaphysical analysis, they have rarely
life or animation. He is always the prominent, often the exclusive,
object of his own song.

Upon a mind so constituted, with its psychological peculiarities
so cherished and confirmed, the fortunes and fates of others, and
the stirring events of his time, made vivid but very transient
impressions. The conversation and writing of contemporaries trained
among books, and with the faculty of speech more fully developed than
that of thought, seemed colorless and empty to one with--whom natural
objects and grandeurs were always present in such overpowering force.
Excluded by his social position from taking an active part in the
public events of the day, and repelled by the emptiness of the then
fashionable literature, he turned to private and humble life as
possessing at least a reality. But he thus withheld himself from
the contemplation of those great mental excitements which only great