... ardors of that elder generation as he would have been by the visions of Dante — an author, by the way, whom he never mentions, even as he never mentions Shakespeare. He had no reverence for Puritan New England. To its moral beauty, its fine severity, he was wholly blind. As a boy he thriftily sold his . He became, in the new fashion of that day, a Deist. Like a true child of the eightee...