freshness of youth. We love him for his boyish love of pure fun. The
two large volumes of his _Letters_ are delicious reading because he
put into them "good wholesome nonsense," as he says, "keeping my
seriousness to bore myself with."

But this sparkling and overflowing humor never obscures the deep
seriousness that is the undercurrent of all his writing. A high
idealism characterizes all his work. One of his greatest services to
his country was the effort to create a saner and sounder political
life. As he himself realized, he often moralized his work too much
with a purposeful idealism. In middle life he said, "I shall never be
a poet until I get out of the pulpit, and New England was all
meeting-house when I was growing up." In religion and philosophy he
was conservative, deprecating the radical and scientific tendencies of
the age, with its knife and glass--

"That make thought physical and thrust far off
The Heaven, so neighborly with man of old,"

The moral impulse and the poetic impulse were often in conflict, and
much of his early poetry for this reason was condemned by his later
judgment. His maturer poems are filled with deep-thoughted lines,
phrases of high aspiration and soul-stirring ecstasies. Though his
thought is spiritual and ideal, it is always firmly rooted in the
experience of common humanity. All can climb the heights with him and
catch inspiring glimpses at least of the ideal and the infinite.