that man of true Genius,
Hawthorne. There is a little of my Confession of Faith about your
Countrymen, and I should say mine, if I were not more Irish than English.

[WOODBRIDGE. _Feb._ 7/76.]

MY DEAR SIR,

I will not look on the Book you have sent me as any Return for the
Booklet I sent you, but as a free and kindly Gift. I really don't know
that you could have sent me a better. I have read it with more
continuous attention and gratification than I now usually feel, and
always (as Lamb suggested) well disposed to say Grace after reading.

Seeing what Mr. Lowell has done for Dante, Rousseau, etc., one does not
wish him to be limited in his Subjects: but I do wish he would do for
English Writers what Ste. Beuve has done for French. Mr. Lowell so far
goes along with him as to give so much of each Writer's Life as may
illustrate his Writings; he has more Humour (in which alone I fancy S. B.
somewhat wanting), more extensive Reading, I suppose; and a power of
metaphorical Illustration which (if I may say so) seems to me to want
only a little reserve in its use: as was the case perhaps with Hazlitt.
But Mr. Lowell is not biassed by Hazlitt's--(by anybody's, so far as I
see)--party or personal prejudices; and altogether seems to me the man
most fitted to do this Good Work, where it has not (as with Carlyle's
Johnson) been done, for good and all, before. Of course, one only wants
the Great Men, in their kind: Chaucer, Pope (Dryden being done {193}),
and perhaps some of the 'minora sidera' clustered together, as Hazlitt
has done them. Perhaps all this will come forth in some future Series
even now gathering in Mr. Lowell's Head. However that may be, this
present Series will make me return to some whom I have not lately looked
up. Dante's face I have not seen these ten years: only his Back on my
Book Shelf. What Mr. Lowell says of him recalled to me what Tennyson
said to me some thirty-five or forty years ago. We were stopping before
a shop in Regent Street where were two Figures of Dante and Goethe. I (I
suppose) said, 'What is there in old Dante's Face that is missing in
Goethe's?' And Tennyson (whose Profile then had certainly a remarkable
likeness to Dante's) said: 'The Divine.' Then Milton; I don't think I've
read him these forty years; the whole Scheme of the Poem, and certain
Parts of it, looming as grand as anything in my Memory; but I never could
read ten lines together without stumbling at some Pedant