He represented the little-recognised fact that in
ripeness, not in rawness, consists the excellence of Americans--an
excellence they must be content to share with contemporary nations,
however much it may cost them to abandon we know not what bounding
ambitions which they have never succeeded in definitely describing in
words. Mr. Lowell was a refutation of the fallacy that an American can
never be American enough. He ranked with the students and the critics
among all nations, and nothing marks his transatlantic conditions except,
perhaps, that his scholarliness is a little anxious and would not seem
so; he enriches his phrases busily, and yet would seem composed; he makes
his allusions tread closely one upon another, and there is an assumed
carelessness, and an ill-concealed vigilance, as to the effect their
number and their erudition will produce upon the reader. The American
sensitiveness takes with him that pleasantest of forms; his style
confesses more than he thinks of the loveable weakness of national
vanity, and asks of the stranger now and again, 'Well, what do you think
of my country?'
Declining, as I do, to separate style in expression from style in the
thought that informs it--for they who make such a separation can hardly
know that style should be in the very conception of a phrase, in its
antenatal history, else the word is neither choice nor authentic--I
recognise in Mr.
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