NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

  There in seclusion and remote from men
    The wizard hand lies cold,
  Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen,
    And left the tale half told.

  Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic power,
    And the lost clew regain? 
  The unfinished window in Aladdin’s tower
  Unfinished must remain!
Hawthorne, May 23, 1864 H.W.  LONGFELLOW.

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

  A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range
  Has Olympus for one pole, for t’other the Exchange;
  He seems, to my thinking (although I’m afraid
  The comparison must, long ere this, have been made). 
  A Plotinus-Montaigne, where the Egyptian’s gold mist
  And the Gascon’s shrewd wit cheek-by-jowl coexist.
A Fable for Critics.  J.R.  LOWELL.

  CARLYLE AND EMERSON.

  C.’s the Titan, as shaggy of mind as of limb,—­
  E. the clear-eyed Olympian, rapid and slim;
  The one’s two thirds Norseman, the other half Greek,
  Where the one’s most abounding, the other’s to seek;
  C.’s generals require to be seen in the mass,—­
  E.’s specialties gain if enlarged by the glass;
  C. gives nature and God his own fits of the blues. 
  And rims common-sense things with mystical hues,—­
  E. sits in a mystery calm and intense,
  And looks coolly around him with sharp common-sense.
A Fable for Critics.  J.R.  LOWELL.

  EDGAR ALLAN POE.

  There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
  Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge,
  Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters. 
  In a way to make people of common sense damn metres,
  Who has written some things quite the best of their kind,
  But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind.
A Fable for Critics.  J.R.  LOWELL.

  JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER.

  There is Whittier, whose swelling and vehement heart
  Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart,
  And reveals the live Man, still supreme and erect,
  Underneath the bemummying wrappers of sect;
  There was ne’er a man born who had more of the swing
  Of the true lyric bard and all that kind of thing;

* * * * *

  Our Quaker leads off metaphorical fights
  For reform and whatever they call human rights,
  Both singing and striking in front of the war,
  And hitting his foes with the mallet of Thor.
A Fable for Critics.  J.R.  LOWELL.

PHILOSOPHY.

  The intellectual power, through words and things,
  Went sounding on, a dim and perilous way!

The Excursion, Bk.  III.  W. WORDSWORTH.

How charming is divine philosophy! 
Not harsh, and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo’s lute,
And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets,
Where no crude surfeit reigns.
Comus.  MILTON.