Henry Giles was active in the Boston-area Unitarian fellowship and had a marked taste for both literature and social issues. The Common Sense orientation of the Scottish school provided him his philosophical basis. Within that theory he used a number of critical premises with liberal flexibility. His topical interests are often representative of mid-nineteenth-century America, but intellectual breadth, a sensible appreciation of literature as an art form, and a sensitive spirit save him from the flat prosiness of many of his contemporaries. The Coleridgean doctrine of imagination enabled him to view the writer as active, observant, creative, and intuitive, while Thomas de Quincey's distinction between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power sanctioned the linking of imagination and intellect without compromising the idea that literature is a distinct form of communication. The Scottish doctrine of sympathy was employed in two senses: sympathy was the means by...