fact, Norton, with little of his friend's popularizing power, was a more progressive link between Emerson's time and ours than was Lowell, because his culture was less musty and his intellectual integrity was more earnest. When his mind had gripped what it took for truth, it did not let go out of what it took for good nature. Those whom he could reach in personal contact or by his amazingly faithful and sympathetic correspondence Norton sustained.
But in general, with the decline of Emerson, American seekers for light were obliged to find their account in Arnold, Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Ruskin, and Pater. They had to go abroad. Lowell, to be sure, had praised old books and nature and patriotism with delightful cleverness and charm. "He liked whatever was sure and wholesome," says Mr. Brownell with a touch of malice, "and eulogized it on all occasions with the zest of a discoverer." But for our conceptions of the historical method; for applications of evolutionary theory to the study of belles-lettres; for the doctrine of the "milieu" and the "Zeitgeist"; for our notions of the importance in culture of painting and the plastic arts; for those quickening watchwords—"conscience in intellectual matters," "study of perfection," "urbanity," "amenity," "sweet reasonableness," "grand style," "Hellenism," "curiosity," "free play of mind," and the rest; and for copious illustration of criticism considered as, in itself, a fine art, we turned, we were obliged to turn, to England and to France.
