ABSTRACT
We would not be supposed to assert that the writer was without his faults. On the contrary, he had several: he had too gloomy a brain, a distempered taste; he was sometimes harsh, and sometimes dull; but he had great sentiment and, not unfrequently, great vigor of expression. He was like Marlowe with this difference — that as Marlowe's imagination was soaring, so, on the other hand, was his penetrating and profound. The one rose to the stars, the other plunged to the centre; equally distant from the bare commonplaces of the earth, they sought for thoughts and images in clouds and depths, and arrived, by different means, to the same great end.
