umor, wit and
imagination from the fullness of an overflowing mind. His prose has
not the chastened correctness and "low tone" of Matthew Arnold's. It
is rich, exuberant, and sometimes over fanciful, running away into
excesses of allusion or following the lead of a chance pun so as
sometimes to lay itself open to the charge of pedantry and bad taste.
Lowell's resources in the way of illustration and comparison are
endless, and the readiness of his wit and his delight in using it put
many temptations in his way. Purists in style accordingly take offense
at his saying that "Milton is the only man who ever got much poetry out
of a cataract, and that was a cataract in his eye;" or of his speaking
of "a gentleman for whom the bottle before him reversed the wonder of
the stereoscope and substituted the Gaston _v_ for the _b_ in
binocular," which is certainly a puzzling and roundabout fashion of
telling us that he had drunk so much {503} that he saw double. The
critics also find fault with his coining such words as "undisprivacied"
and with his writing such lines as the famous one--from the
_Cathedral_, 1870--

"Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman."

It must be acknowledged that his style lacks the crowning grace of
simplicity, but it is precisely by reason of its allusive quality that
scholarly readers take pleasure in it. They like a diction that has
stuff in it and is woven thick, and where a thing is said in such a way
as to recall many other things.

Mention should be made, in connection with this Cambridge circle, of
one writer who touched its circumference briefly. This was Sylvester
Judd, a graduate of Yale, who entered the Harvard Divinity School in
1837 and in 1840 became minister of a Unitarian church in Augusta,
Maine. Judd published several books, but the only one of them at all
rememberable was _Margaret_, 1845, a novel of which Lowell said in _A
Fable for Critics_ that it was "the first Yankee book with the soul of
Down East in it." It was very imperfect in point of art, and its
second part--a rhapsodical description of a sort of Unitarian
Utopia--is quite unreadable. But in the delineation of the few chief
characters and of the rude, wild life of an outlying New England
township just after the close of the revolutionary war, as well as in
the tragic power of the catastrophe, there was genius of a high order.

{504}

As the country has grown older and more populous, and works in all
departmen