660 HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER. 



ing, " He was narrow as a canon is narrow, when the depth apparently 

 contracts the sides " (page 17). So in his criticism called " Longfellow 

 and His Art," Scudder repeatedly expresses in a sentence what might 

 well have occupied a page, as where he says of Longfellow, " He was 

 first of all a composer, and he saw his subjects in their relations rather 

 than in tlieir essence" (page 44). He is equally penetrating where he 

 says that Longfellow "brought to his work in the college no special love 

 of teaching," but '' a deep love of literature and that unacademic attitude 

 toward his work which was a liberalizing jjower" (page 66). He touches 

 equally well that subtle quality of Longfellow's temperament, so difficult 

 to delineate, when he says of him : " He gave of himself freely to his in- 

 timate friends, but he dwelt, nevertheless, in a charmed circle, beyond 

 the lines of which men could not penetrate " (page 68). These admirable 

 statements sufficiently indicate the rare quality of Mr. Scudder's work. 



So far as especial passages go, Mr. Scudder never surpassed the best 

 chapters of " Men and Letters," but his one adequate and complete work 

 as a whole is undoubtedly, apart from his biographies, the volume en- 

 titled "Childhood in Literature and Art" (1894). This book was 

 based on a course of Lowell lectures given by him in Boston, and is 

 probably that by which he himself would wish to be judged, at least up 

 to the time of his admirable " Biography of Lowell." He deals in suc- 

 cessive chapters with Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Mediaeval, English, 

 French, German, and American literary art with great symmetry and 

 unity throughout, culminating, of course, in Hawthorne and analyzing 

 the portraits of children drawn in his productions. In this book one may 

 justly say that he has added himself, in a degree, to the immediate circle 

 of those half dozen great American writers whom he commemorates so 

 nobly at the close of his essay on " Longfellow and his Art," in " Men 

 and Letters." " It is too early to make a full survey of the immense 

 importance to American letters of the work done by half a dozen great 

 men in the middle of this century. The body of prose and verse created 

 by them is constituting the solid foundation upon which other structures 

 are to rise ; the humanity which it holds is entering into the life of the 

 country, and no material invention, or scientific discovery, or institutional 

 prosperity, or accumulation of wealth will so powerfully affect the spir- 

 itual well-being of the nation for generations to come" (p. 69). 



If it now be asked what prevented Horace Scudder from showing 

 more fully this gift of higher literature and led to his acquiescing, through 

 life, in a comparatively secondary function, I can find but one explana- 

 tion, and that a most interesting one to us in New England as illustrating 



