Page:On the Sublime 1890.djvu/35

Rh faults of which, in each other, all writers are conscious, and which he brings home to ourselves. He proclaims the essential merits of conviction, and of selection. He sets before us the noblest examples of the past, most welcome in a straining age which tries already to live in the future. He admonishes and he inspires. He knows the “marvellous power and enthralling charm of appropriate and striking words” without dropping into mere word-tasting. “Beautiful words are the very light of thought,” he says, but does not maunder about the “colour” of words, in the style of the decadence. And then he “leaves this generation to its fate,” and calmly turns himself to the work that lies nearest his hand.

To us he is as much a moral as a literary teacher. We admire that Roman greatness of soul in a Greek, and the character of this unknown man, who carried the soul of a poet, the heart of a hero under the gown of a professor. He was one of those whom books cannot debilitate, nor a life of study incapacitate for the study of life.

A. L.