me, for
the nonce, your equal in age and privilege of speech. For I must wrestle
to-day in earnest!

You are a great nature, a great writer, and a man of piercing intellect:
he is a jack or a dunce that denies it. But of you, more than of most
men at all your equals in intellectual resource, it may be said that
yours is not a spherical or universal, but a special and linear
intelligence,--of great human depth and richness, but special
nevertheless. Of a particular order of truths you are an incomparable
champion; but always you are the champion and on the field, always your
genius has its visor down, and glares through a loop-hole with
straitened intentness of vision. A particular sort of errors and
falsities you can track with the scent of a blood-hound, and with a
speed and bottom not surpassed, if equalled; but the Destinies have put
the nose of your genius to the ground, and sent it off for good and all
upon a particular trail. You sound, indeed, before your encounter, such
a thrilling war-note as turns the cripple's crutch to an imaginary
lance; you open on your quarry with such a cry as kindles a huntsman's
heart beneath the bosoms of nursing mothers. No living writer possesses
the like fascination. Yet, in truth, we should all have tired of your
narrow stringency long ago, did there not run in the veins of your
genius so rich and ruddy a human blood. The profoundness of your
interest in man, and the masterly way in which you grasp character, give
to your thought an inner quality of centrality and wholeness, despite
the dogmatic partiality of its shaping at your hands. And so your
enticement continues, intensely partial though it be.

Continues,--but with growing protest, and growing ground for it. For, to
speak the truth, by your kind permission, without reserve, you are
beginning to suffer from yourself. You are threatening to perish of too
much Thomas Carlyle, I venture to caution you against that tremendous
individual. He is subduing your genius to his own special humors; he is
alloying your mental activity, to a fearful degree, with dogmatic
prepossession; he is making you an intellectual _routinier_, causing
thereby an infiltration of that impurity of which all routine at last
dies. For years we that love you most have seen that you were ceasing
more and more to hold open, fresh relations with truth,--that you were
straitening and hardening into the linear, rigid eagerness of the mere
propagandist. You hav