ue aurora-borealis, and brilliant
ineffectuality.

The great man of Spain sat obscure at the time, all dark and poor, a
maimed soldier; writing his Don Quixote in prison. And Lope's fate
withal was sad, his popularity perhaps a curse to him; for in this
man there was something ethereal too, a divine particle traceable in
few other popular men; and such far shining diffusion of himself, tho
all the world swore by it, would do nothing for the true life of him
even while he lived; he had to creep into a convent, into a monk's
cowl, and learn, with infinite sorrow, that his blessedness had lain
elsewhere; that when a man's life feels itself to be sick and an
error, no voting of by-standers can make it well and a truth again.

Or coming down to our own times, was not August Kotzebue popular?
Kotzebue, not so many years since, saw himself, if rumor and
hand-clapping could be credited, the greatest man going; saw visibly
his "Thoughts," drest out in plush and pasteboard, permeating and
perambulating civilized Europe; the most iron visages weeping with
him, in all theaters from Cadiz to Kamschatka; his own "astonishing
genius," meanwhile, producing two tragedies or so per month; he, on
the whole, blazed high enough: he too has gone out into Night and
_Orcus_, and already is not. We will omit this of popularity
altogether, and account it as making simply nothing toward Scott's
greatness or non-greatness, as an accident, not a quality.

Shorn of this falsifying _nimbus_, and reduced to his own natural
dimensions, there remains the reality, Walter Scott, and what we can
find in him; to be accounted great, or not great, according to the
dialects of men. Friends to precision of epithet will probably deny
his title to the name "great." It seems to us there goes other stuff
to the making of great men than can be detected here. One knows not
what idea worthy of the name of great, what purpose, instinct, or
tendency, that could be called great, Scott ever was inspired with.
His life was worldly; his ambitions were worldly. There was nothing
spiritual in him; all is economical, material of the earth earthy. A
love of picturesque, of beautiful, vigorous and graceful things; a
genuine love, yet not more genuine than has dwelt in hundreds of men
named minor poets: this is the highest quality to be discerned in him.
His power of representing these things too, his poetic power, like his
moral power, was a genius _in extenso_, as we may say