ARNOLD'S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE 151 



given by a peculiar moral and mental bias. It is 

 Thoreau's stoicism and vehement partiality to nature 

 that gives his page such a fillip and genial provoca- 

 tion. And what would Mr. Euskin be without his 

 delightful onesidedness and bright unreasonableness ? 



Few men eminent in literature have been free 

 from some sort of bias. Arnold himself has the 

 academic bias. There is in him a slight collegiate 

 contemptuousness and aloofness which stands a little 

 in the way of his doing full justice, say, to the 

 nonconformist, and to the bereaved mortal who 

 wants to marry his deceased wife's sister, and in 

 the way of his full acceptance by his countrymen, 

 to which he is justly entitled. Was he not also 

 just a little interested in giving our pride in Emer- 

 son a fall, at least a shaking up ? Milton is biased 

 by his Puritanism; his. "Paradise Lost" is the 

 pageant or drama of the Puritan theology ; but he 

 is undoubtedly best as a poet when he forgets his 

 Puritanism. Wordsworth has the didactic bias; 

 his steed of empyrean is yoked with another of 

 much commoner clay. Carlyle's bias is an over- 

 weening partiality for heroes; he cuts all his cloth 

 to this one pattern. Among our own writers, Bry- 

 ant, Longfellow, Irving, have little or no bias; 

 they are disinterested witnesses, but' they are not 

 men of the first order. Our younger corps of writers 

 are free from bias, which is less a merit than their 

 want of earnestness is a defect. 



Arnold's view of Emerson as a poet is not en- 

 tirely new, though perhaps it has never before been 



