His department was ethics; and as a literary
companion, he did not throw himself heartily into the works of
creative genius, but looked, wherever he read, for a moral. In
criticism he was deficient in "individuality," if by that
the phrenologists mean the power of seizing on the peculiar
meanings of special forms. I have heard it said, that, under
changed conditions, he might have been a poet. He had, indeed,
the poetic sense of a creative spirit working everywhere. Man
and nature were living to him; and though he did not yield to
sentiment in particulars he did in universals. But his mind
was not recreative, or even representative.
'He was deeply interesting to me as having so true a respect
for woman. This feeling in him was not chivalrous; it was not
the sentiment of an artist; it was not the affectionateness of
the common son of Adam, who knows that only her presence can
mitigate his loneliness; but it was a religious reverence. To
him she was a soul with an immortal destiny. Nor was there at
the bottom of his heart one grain of masculine assumption. He
did not wish that Man should protect her, but that God should
protect her and teach her the meaning of her lot.
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