Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises

[210] He deals in successive 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 very few 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 spiritual well-being of the nation for generations to come” (page 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 explanation, and that a most interesting one to us in New England, as