The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 33, July, 1860: A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And PoliticsVarious
Science
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 33, July, 1860: A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics
Various
American periodicals
While exhibiting in his jury-trials, as we have shown, this double
process of absolute identification and of perfect supervision and
self-control,--of instantaneous imaginative dips into his work, and
of as instantaneous withdrawal from it,--of purposely and yet
completely throwing himself in one sentence into the realization of
an emotion, thus perfectly conveying his meaning while living the
thought, and yet coming out of it to see quicker than any one that it
might be made absurd by displacement,--he always had, as it were, an
air-drawn, circle of larger thought and superintending relation far
around the immediate question into which he passed so dramatically.
Within this outer circle, attached and related to it by everything in
the subject-matter of real poetic or philosophic importance, was his
case, creatively woven and spread in artistic light and perspective;
and between the two (if we do not press our illustration beyond clear
limits) was a heat-lightning-like play of mind, showing itself, at
one moment, in unexpected flashes of poetic analogy, at another in
Puck-like mischief, and again in imaginative irony or humor.
As he recovered himself from abandonment to some part of his case or
argument to guide and mould the whole, so, going into his library, he
could, as completely, for minutes or for hours, banish and forget his
anxieties and dramatic excitements, and pass into the cooling air and
loftier and purer stimulations of the great minds of other times and
countries and of the great questions that overhang us all. His mind,
capacious, informed, wise, doubting, "looking before and after," here
found its highest pleasures, and its little, but most loved repose.
"The more a man does, the more he can do"; and, notwithstanding his
immense practice, and that by physical and intellectual constitution
he couldn't _half_ do anything, he never allowed a day of his life to
pass, without reading some, if ever so little, Greek, and it was a
surprise to those who knew him well to find that he kept up with
everything important in modern literature. Rising and going to bed
early, taking early morning exercise, having a strong constitution,
though he was subject to sudden but quickly overcome nervous and
bilious illness, wasting no time, caring nothing for the coarser
social enjoyments, leading, out of court, a self-withdrawn and
solitary life, though playful, genial, and stimulating in social
intercourse, with a memory as tenacious and ready as his apprehension
was quick, with high powers of detecting, mastering, arranging, and
fusing his acquisitions, and of penetrating to the centre of
historical characters and events,--it is not strange, though he may
not have been critically exact and nice in questions of quantity and
college exercises, that his scholarship was large and available in
all its higher aims and uses.
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