Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches

[112] and all sentimentality; but it lacks the musical element. He composed neither songs nor ballads,--nothing to match Hiawatha, or Gray's famous Elegy. America still awaits a poet who shall combine the savoir faire of Lowell with the force of Emerson and the grace and purity of Longfellow.

Emerson had an advantage over his literary contemporaries in the vigorous life he lived. You feel in his writing the energy of necessity. The academic shade is not favorable to the cultivation of genius, and Lowell reclined under it too much. His best work was already performed before he became a professor. What he lacks as a poet, however, he compensates for as a wit. He is the best of American humorists --there are few who will be inclined to dispute that-even though we regret occasional cynicisms, like his jest on Milton's blindness in “Fireside travels.”