Indeed, much as we must all admire his poetic fervor and fancies, I do not find in him traces of heroic mould;--easily friendly rather than firmly so;--full of an effusive piety, but not coming in way of martyrdom for faith’s sake;--a tenderly contemplative man, loving and sensing beauty in the same sure and abounding way in which Turner has sense of color--exhaustless in his stock of brilliant and ingenious imagery--running to similes as mountain rills run to rivers; a courtier withal--honeyed and sometimes fulsome; a richly presentable man (if portraits may be trusted), with a well-trimmed face, a cautious face--dare I say--almost a smirking face;--the face of a self-contained man who thinks allowably well of his parts, and is determined to make the most of them. And in the brows over the fine eyes there is a bulging out--where phrenologists place the bump of language--that shows where his forte lies: No such word-master had been heard to sing since the days when Chaucer sung. He is deeply read in Chaucer too; and read in all--worth reading--who came between. His lingual aptitudes are amazing. He can tear words in tatters, and he can string them rhythmically in all shapes; he makes his own law in language, as he grows heated in his work; twists old phrases out of shape; makes new ones; binds them together; tosses them as he will to the changing level of his thought: so that whereas one may go to Chaucer, in points of language, as to an authority--one goes to Spenser as to a mine of graceful and euphonious phrases: but the authority is wanting--or, at least, is not so safe. He makes uses for words which no analogy and no good order can recognize. And his new words are not so much the product of keen, shrewd search after what will fullest and strongest express a feeling or a thought, or give color to epithet, as they are the luxuriant outcropping of a tropical genius for language, which delights in abundant forms, and makes them with an easy show of its own fecundity, or for the chance purpose of filling a line, or meting out the bounds of an orderly prosody.