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that church. A modest, though manly preacher, he is not by any means a fashionable preacher; most fortunately for us and for his own true interest, though not for his pecuniary interest.

Able controvertists arise, flourish, die, are forgotten. Brilliant declaimers flash and vanish more suddenly still; but genuine poetry outlasts controversies and fashions in oratory, though it gives no personal popularity or worldly honors, or worldly gear. The Muse yields nothing perishGold is not lasting, but glory is; so

able to her followers.

the Poet, too often, is poor and famous.

In the case of a professional man, this and we hope will not be with our author. Church should especially cherish.

should not be; Such as he, the

VII.

THE LITERARY CHARACTER OF R. H. DANA.

THE review of American novelists in the Foreign Quarterly, just and fair in the main, was yet guilty of omissions that should have been noticed at the time, and the authors neglected fully discussed by a competent critic. It is not our purpose at present to occupy the whole ground, nor to attempt filling the wide and unseemly gap left by the reviewer-more, we apprehend, from ignorance or inadvertence, than from any desire to suppress excellence, or hide real merit. That duty we leave to the American critic, who can honestly appraise the peculiar talents and unique productions of several among our lighter writers, whose names we might mention, not one of whom is alluded to by the critic; while two serious writers-the one a great painter, and the other a true poet, of unquestioned excellence as writers of prose fiction, Allston in his Monaldi, and Dana in certain tales, among prose fictions holding a somewhat analogous rank to that the master-pieces of Heywood and Middleton would sustain in a comparison with the Shaksperian drama-have been passed over without attracting the most casual remark.

This extreme carelessness may furnish some excuse for the critical remarks we are about to make, and for attempting to sketch the features of one of the purest and noblest of our American men of genius.

An equally good reason for such a sketch may be found in the fact of the great injustice done our author by the present race of readers, to whom he is known only by name. Genius and virtue like that of Mr. Dana's should be kept fresh and alive before his countrymen. Such men as he are not given to the world to be left in doubt as to whether they have lighted upon their appropriate sphere, or whether they have not wandered into some stranger orb. Though Mr. Dana has not been a voluminous writer, he has still written abundantly enough, and with adequate power, to reveal to all who can understand him, the purity and nobleness of his aims, and to impress young and docile minds with the wisest lessons of life and duty.

It is now nearly a quarter of a century since we have seen anything in the way of prose fiction, in print, by the author of the Idle Man; during which period so many candidates for public honor, and claimants for a niche in the temple of fame, have been pouring in, that the public eye is well nigh clouded by the sparkling ephemerida, and the public ear confounded by loud clamors and noisy appeals. In the midst of this hubbub, the silent speculative genius of Dana, and the power, the purity, and the classic cast of Dana's writings have passed almost unregarded. Among the thousands who devour James, the tens who study Dana may be easily enumerated. The lovers of historical melodrama see nothing in simple, undisguised, unaffected, yet most real and vigorous true dramatic painting. Perhaps the American is too much of a philosopher for these readers, who are captivated by detailed narrative, and circumstantial description; though, as a mere writer of tales, full of striking characters, closely crowded with stirring incidents, set in a frame of poetic description, and enshrined within a halo of pure imagination,

Dana is in the first rank of novelists. It is wrong to speak of him as a mere tale writer, for his tales are not only as long as certain short novels, (as long and longer than Rasselas, Zadig, Candide, or the admirable fictions of Richter, Zschokke, and other German novelists,) but they are so closely woven that they read sometimes like abstracts of longer works. There is nothing to be spared; the utmost economy is observed. Yet, as we said, the evident philosophic character of the author, the basis, indeed, of his poetical nature, as well as the love of speculating upon character, the motives to action, the principles of conduct, may deter the mere readers for amusement, since Dana is manifestly a teacher of men, and is to be estimated rightly only in that character. He has selected prose fiction, we imagine, only as a vehicle for conveying certain pictures of life, portraits of certain individuals, wholesome moral satire, an ideal of contented private enjoyments, and of a life of active, enlightened duty.

Sentiment, we apprehend, forms the most prominent feature in the genius and writings of Mr. Dana. No mere sentimentalist, our author is emphatically a man of sentiment; no hypocritical Joseph Surface, full of cant and moral pretensions, but a genuine man of feeling, unlike, or rather superior to, Mackenzie's hero, in being besides a true philosophic observer of life and character, a stern self-student, and a powerful painter, according to the stereotyped phrase, of men and manners..

This attribute of sentiment, in the instance of our author, is at one and the same time, a moral and intellectual quality, religious, high-toned, upright, masculine, partaking of the pathetic sweetness of Mackenzie, and the stern dignity of Wordsworth. Apart from this faculty, Mr. Dana is a writer

of great purity and power, of much acuteness, and elegance in other walks than in those of philosophic sentiment, or of sentimental description; but in those he is master, and ranks first among his contemporaries and countrymen. He has vast power in depicting the struggles of the darker passions, jealousy, hatred, suspicion and remorse. Paul Felton has touches of Byronic force, and discloses a similar vein to that so fully opened, and with such popular effect, in the works of Godwin and Charles Brockden Brown.

Sentiment furnishes the key also to the criticisms of Dana. We noticed this in his lectures a few winters since, on the poets and dramatists. He finds this, his favorite faculty, beautifully expressed by the ballad writers and Shaksperian dramatists among the old writers; and by Wordsworth and Coleridge, among the new; and to them he has given his heart. The single critical paper, in the volume of Dana's selected works, on the acting of Kean, is full of it, no less than of acuteness, and deep insight into the mystery of art, and which are colored and defined by it, to a point and degree that may be honestly declared as not being very far distant from perfection. The paper is almost equal in its way to Elia's admirable sketches, in the same vein of subtle criticism.

As a writer of sentiment, love in its forms, both of sentiment and passion, (for it varies in different natures, and is the offspring of the affections and of the fancy, according to the individual constitution, mental or moral or sensitive, of the recipient and cherisher of it,) constitutes the staple of Dana's invention and speculation; of love, in all its degrees, he is a delicate limner or a vigorous painter, according as the subject is a delicate woman or a manly man, a quiet retired meditative nature or a stirring ambitious character. The female character has full justice done it by the writer

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