Lydia Maria Child, Letters of Lydia Maria Child
John Greenleaf Whittier, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Winslow Sewall, Ed.

To the same.

I am aware that I have been too indolent in examining the systems of great writers; that I have not enough cultivated habits of thought and reflection upon any subject. The consequence is, my imagination has ripened before my judgment; I have quickness of perception, without profoundness of thought; I can at one glance take in a subject as displayed by another, but I am incapable of investigation. What time I have found since I wrote you last has been pretty much employed in reading Gibbon. I have likewise been reading Shakespeare. I had before taken detached views of the works of this great .master of human nature; but had never before read him. What a vigorous grasp of intellect; what a glow of imagination he must have possessed; but when his fancy droops a little, how apt he is to make low attempts at wit, and introduce a forced play upon words. Had he been an American, the reviewers, in spite of his genius, would have damned him for his [5] contempt of the unities. It provokes me to see these critics with their pens “dipped in scorpion's gall,” blighting the embryo buds of native genius. Neal must be condemned forsooth, without mercy, because his poem was one of genius' wildest, most erratic flights. Were every one as devout a worshipper at the shrine of genius as I am, they would admire him, even in his wanderings. I have been looking over the “Spectator.” I do not think Addison so good a writer as Johnson, though a more polished one. The style of the latter is more vigorous, there is more nerve, if I may so express it, than in the former. Indeed, Johnson is my favorite among all his contemporaries. I know of no author in the English language that writes like him.