So skillful in his mild modernism …, so various in his errant annotations is Meredith [in Hazard, the Painter] that we do not know, even at the end, what hit us—a caress of ground glass and very finely honed feathery blades, most likely, so that hits just aren't in it. Mortality and the dimming senses are the apparent pretext of these ruminations…. But the real subject is ressentiment, even anger, and the real object throughout is America the Imperial, these States in their warring "decline" viewed from a perspective which has only darkened since Emerson unbosomed himself to his journal, 1847…. Meredith doesn't want to be a prophet, only an artist, a messenger, an angel maybe. But the observation, the organic detail plucked out and brooded upon until it yields up its sense, its significance—that is Emersonian (the ground-juniper), and it is Meredithian too:

        Near the big spruce...