such inappreciable value, especially in the beginning of national
effort, between the several sister arts of writing, music,
painting, and dramatic exhibition, which the singular variety and
discursiveness of his intellectual sympathies led him constantly
to maintain and vindicate; these, in the multiplicity of their
operation, and the full power of their joint effect, can be perfectly
understood only by those who possessed a contemporaneous knowledge
of the circumstances, and who, remembering the state of things
at the commencement of the period alluded to, and observing what
existed at the end of it, are able to look back over the whole interval, and see to what influences
and what persons the
extraordinary change which has taken place, is to be referred. If,
at this moment, the literary genius of America, renewed in youth,
and quivering lie the eagle's wings with excess of vigor, seems
about to make a new flight, from a higher vantage-ground, into
loftier depths of airy distance, the capacity to take that flight
must, to a great degree, be ascribed to those two persons whom we
have named; without whose services the brighter era which appears
now to be dawning, might yet be distant and doubtful.

Besides these particulars of past effort, which ought to make his
countrymen love the reputation of the subject of this notice, we
regret that our limits forbid us to speak at large of those more
intimate qualities of personal value, which, in our judgment, form
the genuine lustre of one who, admirable for other attainments, is
to be imitated in these.

To us it is an instinctive feeling that a wrong is done to the
proper grandeur of our complex nature--that a violence is offered
to the higher consciousness of our immortal being--whenever an