There is no story from which the reader can turn
with a higher sense of another's greatness and goodness, or an humbler
sense of his own.
_Character and Characteristic Men._ By EDWIN P. WHIFFLE.
Boston: Ticknor and Fields.
If we should say this is a book that brings its author under its title,
and that he is in every page of it to the unconscious subject of his own
pen, we might sufficiently express our sense of its reality and vital
strength. But no self-introduction could be more modest or undesigned.
We know of no volume in which vigor walks with less attendance of
vanity, or less motion of covert egotism in the stalwart stride; yet the
_style_, which proverbially is the _man_, does not lack decisive stamp,
but is too peculiar to be confounded with any other. It is not flaming,
or flowing, or architectural. It is not built, but wrought, with blows
of the hammer. We should emphasize the writer's historic taste, but that
his learning is so at the service of his philosophy that it never
burdens, but only arms. There is a tough welding of principle with fact,
and fetching of opposite poles together in the constant circulation
betwixt ideas and events. Sometimes an excess of antithesis shows a
little too much the wrinkled brow of thought, striving to put more into
a sentence than it will fairly carry, and corrugating the elsewhere
smoother lines,--as in a hilly country there was said to be too much
soil to be evenly disposed of, and so part of it had to be pushed up
into the sky.
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