of the poet whom some admired without understanding, a few understood, or
thought they did, without admiring, and many both understood and
admired,--among these there being not a small number who went far beyond
admiration, and lost themselves in devout worship? While one exalted him
as "the greatest man that ever lived," another, a friend, famous in the
world of letters, wrote expressly to caution me against the danger of
overrating a writer whom he is content to recognize as an American
Montaigne, and nothing more.

After finishing this Memoir, which has but just left my hands, I would
gladly have let my brain rest for a while. The wide range of thought
which belonged to the subject of the Memoir, the occasional mysticism and
the frequent tendency toward it, the sweep of imagination and the sparkle
of wit which kept his reader's mind on the stretch, the union of
prevailing good sense with exceptional extravagances, the modest audacity
of a nature that showed itself in its naked truthfulness and was not
ashamed, the feeling that I was in the company of a sibylline
intelligence which was discounting the promises of the remote future long
before they were due,--all this made the task a grave one. But when I
found myself amidst the vortices of uncounted, various, bewildering
judgments, Catholic and Protestant, orthodox and liberal, scholarly from
under the tree of knowledge and instinctive from over the potato-hill;
the passionate enthusiasm of young adorers and the cool, if not cynical,
estimate of hardened critics, all intersecting each other as they
whirled, each around its own centre, I felt that it was indeed very
difficult to keep the faculties clear and the judgment unbiassed.

It is a great privilege to have lived so long in the society of such a
man. "He nothing common" said, "or mean." He was always the same pure
and high-souled companion. After being with him virtue seemed as natural