162 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



but no writer for the public can be exempt from the vexations of au- 

 thorship. The testimony I would now bear to our deceased friend is 



tjiis ; that, amidst all the petty trials which to so many authors make 



life one continued agony, or constant solicitude, he ever kept his seren- 

 ity, his superiority to bis work ; — that, though self-relying, because 

 conscious of his high faculties and of the scrupulous fidelity he had 

 used in seeking for the truth, he yet welcomed the contradiction of 

 friends while it could aid him in reviewing his own judgments (always 

 his own) whether as to fact or to expression. In such cases he was so 

 intent upon accuracy in fact and fitness in art, that his self-love never 

 was wounded by the sharpest criticism, right or wrong. It was a 

 personal matter, not with him, but with Truth, whom he served. If 

 wrong, it glanced off; if right, he laid it upon her altar. The self- 

 discipline which this implies in one so sensitive to literary applause, so 

 justified (if any one could be) in intellectual pride, can belong only to 

 noble natures ; and its exercise is a test of true magnanimity. 



" Endowed with the imagination and fancy of a poet, he felt his 

 danger as an historian ; and he restrained his fancy with a giant's 

 grasp. Proportion, congruity, what sacrifices do they not require of a 

 mind so exuberant ! The ingenious thoughts, the briUiant images, the 

 felicitous phrases, which were discarded, — how great was the sum of 

 them ! The rejected stones were of the same material as the edifice in 

 its finished beauty. When he had established the facts relating to his 

 theme by the most laborious study, perhaps for years, and his mind 

 was full-fraught with materials, arranged in logical order, then ' he 

 mused, and the fire burned.' Then came the bounding play of his 

 finer faculties. He delighted to throw himself into the characters he 

 had to do with, in their own time and place, and to reason, feel, enjoy, 

 and suffer with them ; and this he thought necessary in order to pass a 

 fair judgment on them as human agents, — as they were in themselves, 

 and as influenced by circumstances. He 'suffered' with them, and 

 'learned mercy.' But he never failed afterward dispassionately to 

 take the judgment-seat. His mind had become eminently judicial, 

 trained in this respect by the most intimate communion with his 

 distinguished father. And if he has not often pronounced formal 

 sentences, — if, of all that was true in any case, he shows a marked 

 propension to what was unquestionably good in it, — he yet believed 

 that somewhere, in his text or his notes, he had left, in every such 



