If we consider how vast a labor was represented in all those volumes, it is interesting to revert to that comparison between Stedman and his friend Aldrich with which this paper began. Their literary lives led them apart; that of Aldrich tending always to condensation, that of Stedman to expansion. As a consequence, Aldrich seemed to grow younger and younger with years and Stedman older; his work being always valuable, but often too weighty, “living in thoughts, not breaths,” to adopt the delicate distinction from Bailey’s “Festus.” There is a certain worth in all that Stedman wrote, be it longer or shorter, but it needs a good deal of literary power to retain the attention of readers so long as some of his chapters demand. Opening at random his “Poets of America,” one may find the author deep in a discussion of Lowell, for instance, and complaining of that poet’s prose or verse. “Not compactly moulded,” Stedman says, even of much of Lowell’s work. “He had a way, moreover, of ‘dropping’ like his own bobolink, of letting down his fine passages with odd conceits, mixed metaphors, and licenses which, as a critic, he would not overlook in another. To all this add a knack of coining uncouth words for special tints of meaning, when there are good enough counters in the language for any poet’s need.” These failings, Stedman says, “have perplexed the poet’s friends and teased his reviewers.” Yet Lowell’s critic is more chargeable with diffuseness than is Lowell himself in prose essays, which is saying a good deal. Stedman devotes forty-five pages to Lowell and thirty-nine even to Bayard Taylor, while he gives to Thoreau but a few scattered lines and no pretense at a chapter. There are, unquestionably, many fine passages scattered through the book, as where he keenly points out that the first European appreciation of American literature was “almost wholly due to grotesque and humorous exploits—a welcome such as a prince in his breathing-hour might give to a new-found jester or clown”; and when he says, in reply to English criticism, that there is “something worth an estimate in the division of an ocean gulf, that makes us like the people of a new planet.”