never took hold of him, but for their style, of which he was enamored.  The best characterization of South and Barrow I ever heard he gave me once in a casual conversation.  The great English novelists he knew; Walter Scott’s novels, of which he had several editions in his library, were great favorites with him, but he read them rather for the beauty of their descriptive passages than for their romantic and dramatic interest.  Ruskin’s ‘Modern Painters’ he both used himself and recommended to others as a text-book in the observation of nature, and certain passages in them he read and re-read.

But in his reading he followed the bent of his own mind rather than any prescribed system.  Neither in his public utterances nor in his private conversation did he indicate much indebtedness to Shakespeare among the earlier writers, nor to Emerson or Carlyle among the moderns.  Though not unfamiliar with the greatest English poets, and the great Greek poets in translations, he was less a reader of poetry than of poetical prose.  He had, it is true, not only read but carefully compared Dante’s ‘Inferno’ with Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’; still it was not the ‘Paradise Lost,’ it was the ‘Areopagitica’ which he frequently read on Saturday nights, for the sublimity of its style and the inspiration it afforded to the imagination.  He was singularly deficient in verbal memory, a deficiency which is usually accompanied by a relatively slight appreciation of the mere rhythmic beauty of literary form.  It is my impression that for amorous poems, such as Moore’s songs, or even Shakespeare’s sonnets, and for purely descriptive poetry, such as the best of ‘Childe Harold’ and certain poems of Wordsworth, he cared comparatively little.

But he delighted in religious poetry, whether the religion was that of the pagan Greek Tragedies, the mediaeval Dante, or the Puritan Milton.  He was a great lover of the best hymns, and with a catholicity of affection which included the Calvinist Toplady, the Arminian Wesley, the Roman Catholic Faber, and the Unitarian Holmes.  Generally, however, he cared more for poetry of strength than for that of fancy or sentiment.  It was the terrific strength in Watts’s famous hymn beginning

     “My thoughts on awful subjects dwell,
     Damnation and the dead,”

which caused him to include it in the ‘Plymouth Collection,’ abhorrent as was the theology of that hymn alike to his heart and to his conscience.

In any estimate of Mr. Beecher’s style, it must be remembered that he was both by temperament and training a preacher.  He was brought up not in a literary, but in a didactic atmosphere.  If it were as true as it is false that art exists only for art’s sake, Mr. Beecher would not have been an artist.  His art always had a purpose; generally a distinct moral purpose.  An overwhelming proportion of his contributions to literature consists of sermons or extracts from sermons, or addresses not less distinctively