few superiors, and, in his own country, none. Whatever be their
esthetic and technical deficiencies, he has written many poems of
sentiment and pathos which can never fail to come home to all to whom
such poetry appeals. His hortatory and didactic poetry, as it
expresses itself in the _Commemoration Ode_, is worthy, if not of the
music and felicity of Milton and Wordsworth, at least of their tone,
when that tone is most exalted. As a humorist he is inimitable. His
humor is rooted in a fine sense of the becoming, and in a profounder
insight into the character of his countrymen than that of any other
American writer."--_John Churton Collins_.

* * * * *

"He was a brilliant wit and a delightful humorist; a discursive
essayist of unfailing charm; the best American critic of his time; a
scholar of wide learning, deep also when his interest was most
engaged; a powerful writer on great public questions; a patriot
passionately pure; but first, last, and always he was a poet, never
so happy as when he was looking at the world from the poet's mount of
vision and seeking for fit words and musical to tell what he had seen.
But his emotion was not sufficiently 'recollected in tranquillity.'
Had he been more an artist he would have been a better poet, for then
he would have challenged the invasions of his literary memory, his
humor, his animal spirits, within limits where they had no right of
way. If his humor was his rarest, it was his most dangerous gift; so
often did it tempt him to laugh out in some holy place.... Less
charming than Longfellow, less homely than Whittier, less artistic
than Holmes, less grave than Bryant, less vivid than Emerson, less
unique than Poe, his qualities, intellectual, moral and esthetic, in
their assemblage and coördination assign him to a place among American