ve and complex, or what Jeremy Taylor calls _agglomerative,_ and
puts the Addisonian models utterly to rout,--a style such as only the
largest and most Titanic workman could effectively use. A sensitive lady
of my acquaintance says reading the "Vistas" is like being exposed to
a pouring hailstorm,--the words fairly bruise her mind. In its literary
construction the book is indeed a shower, or a succession of showers,
multitudinous, wide-stretching, down-pouring,--the wrathful bolt and the
quick veins of poetic fire lighting up the page from time to time. I
can easily conceive how certain minds must be swayed and bent by some
of these long, involved, but firm and vehement passages. I cannot deny
myself the pleasure of quoting one or two pages. The writer is referring
to the great literary relics of past times:--

"For us, along the great highways of time, those monuments stand,--those
forms of majesty and beauty. For us those beacons burn through all the
nights. Unknown Egyptians, graving hieroglyphs; Hindus, with hymn and
apothegm and endless epic; Hebrew prophet, with spirituality, as in
flames of lightning, conscience like red-hot iron, plaintive songs and
screams of vengeance for tyrannies and enslavement; Christ, with bent
head, brooding love and peace, like a dove; Greek, creating eternal
shapes of physical and aesthetic proportion; Roman, lord of satire, the
sword, and the codex,--of the figures, some far off and veiled, others
near and visible; Dante, stalking with lean form, nothing but fibre,
not a grain of superfluous flesh; Angelo, and the great painters,
architects, musicians; rich Shakespeare, luxuriant as the sun, artist
and singer of Feudalism in its sunset, with all the gorgeous colors,
owner thereof, and using them at will;--and so to such as German Kant
and Hegel, where they, though near us, leaping over the ages, sit again,
impassive, imperturbable, like the Egyptian gods. Of these, and the like
of these, is it too much, indeed, to return to our favorite figure,
and view them as orbs, moving in free paths in the spaces of that other
heaven, the cosmic intellect, the Soul?

"Ye powerful and resplendent ones! ye were, in your atmospheres, grown
not for America, but rather for her foes, the Feudal and the old--while
our genius is democratic and modern. Yet could ye, indeed, but breathe
your breath of life into our New World's nostrils--not to enslave us as
now, but, for our needs, to breed a spirit like y