SOURCE: "The Richard Henry Danas: Father and Son," in Law and Letters in American Culture, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984, pp. 241-72.

In the following excerpt, Ferguson compares Dana's early romanticism with his later thoughts on legal theory, contrasting the gothic story "Paul Felton" (1822), with the essay "Law as Suited to Man " (1835).

Some individuals personify the wholeness of an age; others reflect the incompleteness of its parts. Daniel Webster, in the first category, spoke confidently for the nineteenth century and symbolized its conventions. The Richard Henry Danas, father and son, were more shadowy figures caught up in changes that they only partially understood. As traditional as Webster in politics and social matters, they accepted many of the new impulses sweeping through nineteenth-century intellectual thought, and those impulses were complex. It was not just that Webster admired Pope over all other poets while the Danas preferred Wordsworth. The whole...