to try the serpentine one.  There were no crooked pathways in Hazlitt’s intellect.  His style is brilliant, but never cloyed with ornamentation.  Hazlitt’s paper on Gifford was thought by Procter to be as pungent a bit of writing as had appeared in his day, and he quoted this paragraph as a sample of its biting justice:  “Mr. Gifford is admirably qualified for the situation he has held for many years as editor of the ‘Quarterly’ by a happy combination of defects, natural and acquired.”  In one of his letters to me Procter writes, “I despair of the age that has forgotten to read Hazlitt.”

Procter was a delightful prose writer, as well as a charming poet.  Having met in old magazines and annuals several of his essays and stories, and admiring their style and spirit, I induced him, after much persuasion, to collect and publish in America his prose works.  The result was a couple of volumes, which were brought out in Boston in 1853.  In them there are perhaps no “thoughts that wander through eternity,” but they abound in fancies which the reader will recognize as agile

    “Daughters of the earth and sun.”

In them there is nothing loud or painful, and whoever really loves “a good book,” and knows it to be such on trial, will find Barry Cornwall’s “Essays and Tales in Prose” most delectable reading.  “Imparadised,” as Milton hath the word, on a summer hillside, or tented by the cool salt wave, no better afternoon literature can be selected.  One will never meet with distorted metaphor or tawdry rhetoric in Barry’s thoughtful pages, but will find a calm philosophy and a beautiful faith, very precious and profitable in these days of doubt and insecurity of intellect.  There is a respite and a sympathy in this fine spirit, and so I commend him heartily in times so full of turmoil and suspicion as these.  One of the stories in the first volume of these prose writings, called “The Man-Hunter,” is quite equal in power to any of the graphic pieces of a similar character ever written by De Quincey or Dickens, but the tone in these books is commonly more tender and inclining to melancholy.  What, for instance, could be more heart-moving than these passages of his on the death of little children?

“I scarcely know how it is, but the deaths of children seem to me always less premature than those of elder persons.  Not that they are in fact so; but it is because they themselves have little or no relation to time or maturity.  Life seems a race which they have yet to run entirely.  They have made no progress toward the goal.  They are born—­nothing further.  But it seems hard, when a man has toiled high up the steep hill of knowledge, that he should be cast like Sisyphus, downward in a moment; that he who has worn the day and wasted the night in gathering the gold of science should be, with all his wealth of learning, all his accumulations, made bankrupt at once.  What becomes of all the riches of the soul, the piles and pyramids of precious thoughts