into the cavern through which he worked his cause up to the cheerful day.”
Other such passages might easily be added; indeed they are already to be found, here and there, distributed through this memoir. And her critical verdicts are often condensed into passages as compact as the following — as where she says of Coleridge, “Give Coleridge a canvas and he will paint a single mood as if his colors were made of the mind’s own atoms;” or of Southey, “In his most brilliant passages there is nothing of inspiration;” or of Shelley, “The rush, the flow, the delicacy of vibration in Shelley’s verse can only be paralleled by the waterfall, the rivulet, the notes of the bird and of the insect world;” or when she speaks of the “balm” applied by Wordsworth to the public heart after the fever of Byron; or depicts the “strange bleak fidelity” of Crabbe; or says of Campbell that he did not possess “as much lyric flow as force;”[1] or of literary phases and fashions generally, “There is no getting rid of the epidemic of the season, however amazing and useless it may seem; you cannot cough down an influenza, it will cough you down;”[2] in all these statements she makes not merely a series of admirable points, but she really gives the condensed essence of criticism. She seems to me to have been, in her average work, the best literary critic that America has yet seen. Her
