The centrality of this thought is seen in his style. It is a remarkable style, and is only to be appreciated when the man is understood. It is made up of long sentences full of qualifying phrases until the thought is carved into perfect exactness; or--changing the figure--shade upon shade is added until the picture and conception are alike. But with all this piling up of phrases, he not only did not lose proportion and rhythm, but so set down his words that they read like a chant and sound like the breaking of waves upon the beach. Nor does he ever part with poetry in the high sense in which he conceived it. I will not compare his style, as to merit, with that of Milton and Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne, but he belongs to their class; he has the same majestic swing, and like them he cannot forbear singing, whatever he may have to say. His theme may be roads, or city plans, or agriculture, or emigration, or the growth of law; yet he never fails of lifting his subject into that higher world of the imagination where the real truth of the subject is to be found, and is made to appear as poetry. It would be unjust to identify him so thoroughly with the poets if it should lead to the thought that he was not a close and rigorous thinker. It should not be forgotten that all great prose-writers, from Plato down to Carlyle and Emerson, stand outside of poetry only by virtue of their form and not by virtue of their thought; indeed, poet and thinker are interchangeable names. Dr. Bushnell wrote chiefly on theology, and the value and efficacy of his writings lie in the fact that imagination and fact, thought and sentiment, reason and feeling, are each preserved and yet so mingled as to make a single impression. This combination of two realms or habits of thought appears on every page. He was, as Novalis said of Spinoza, "A God-intoxicated man," but it was God as containing humanity in himself. His theology was a veritable Jacob's ladder, on which the angels of God ascend and descend; and if in his thought they descended before they ascended, it was because he conceived of humanity as existing in God before it was manifest in creation; and if his head was among the stars, his feet were always firmly planted on the earth. This twofoldness finds a curious illustration in the sub-titles of several of his books. 'The Vicarious Sacrifice' does not spring alone out of the divine nature, but is 'Grounded in Principles of Universal Obligation.' 'Nature and the Supernatural'--the great antithesis in theology--constitute 'The One System of God.' 'Women's Suffrage' is 'The Reform against Nature'--the best book, I must be permitted to say, on either side of this much-debated question.