he has something of both, though nothing of the modern scholar, so called.  His art is logic, but he never aims at art.  By nature he is a most genuine and true man; none so much so.  By no means E——­” [Emerson?] “who ever prates about this thing.  If he attempts embellishment, you see at once it is borrowed; it is not in his nature.  There is a pure and genuine vein of poetry running through him, but it is not sufficient to tincture the whole flow of his life.  He is a man of the thirteenth or fourteenth century rather than of the nineteenth.  He is an anomaly among its scholars, writers, and divines.  He is not thorough on any one subject though at home on all.  What a finished collegiate education would have done for him I am baffled to conjecture.  He is genuine, and I love him for that; it is the crown of all virtues.  But I must stop.  I only intended to mention that he is here.”

The reader may well suppose that Father Hecker fully appreciated Brownson’s literary genius.  The English language in his grasp was a weapon to slay and a talisman to raise to life.  Never was argumentation made more delightful reading; never did a master instruct more exclusively by the aid of his disciple’s highest faculties than did Brownson.  Habituated his whole life long to the ardent study of the greatest topics of the human understanding, he was able to teach all, as he had taught young Hecker, how to think, discern, judge, penetrate, decide about them with matchless power; and he clothes his conclusions in language as adequate to express them as human language well can be.  Clearness, precision, force, purity, vividness, loftiness are terms applicable to Dr. Brownson’s literary style.  It may be that the general reading public will not study his works merely for the sake of his literary merits; the pleasures of the imagination and of narrative are not to be found in Dr. Brownson.  But he certainly will win his way to the suffrages of the higher class of students of fine writing.  And let one have any shadow of interest in the great questions he treats, and every page displays a style which is the rarest of literary gifts.  The very fact that his writing is untinted by those lesser beauties which catch the eye but to impede its deepest glances, is in itself an excellence all the greater in proportion to the gravity of his topics.  Absolutely free from the least obscurity, his diction is a magnetic medium uniting the master’s personality, the disciple’s understanding, and the essence of the subject under consideration.  Cardinal Newman, some may believe, possessed this supreme rhetoric in perhaps even a higher degree than Brownson, but so much can be said of few other writers of English prose.  George Ripley, whom Father Hecker deemed the best judge of literature in our country or elsewhere, assured him that there were passages in Dr. Brownson which could not be surpassed in the whole range of English literature.

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CHAPTER XIX