Henry Adams, and deepening the resonance of American letters.
But Mr. More, returning to his desk, either continues his history of Neo-Platonism, which I wish he could leave to a scholar with no autobiography to write, or else—which fills me with "malice"—he supplants that great work by a Shelburne essay on Aphra Behn. This "pilgrim of the infinite"—what has Aphra to do with him, or he with Aphra? But what is a Shelburne essay? It is generally an imperfect, fragmentary cross-section, sometimes only the outer bark of a cross-section, of the character and personality which I have been sketching. It is criticism, it is history, it is philosophy, it is morality, it is religion, it is, above all, a singularly moving poetry, gushing up from deep intellectual and moral substrata, pure, cold, and refreshing, as water of a spring from the rocks in some high mountain hollow. This poetry of ideas was abundant in the first and the sixth series of the Shelburne essays and was nearly continuous in some of the single essays like The Quest of a Century in the third and Victorian Literature in the seventh. By its compression of serious thought and deep feeling it produces an effect as of one speaking between life and death, as the Apology of Socrates does. There is a pulse in the still flow of it, as if it had been stirred once and forever at the bottom of the human heart. It is for this poetry that we love Mr. More. But one has to go so far for it! In the long series, it is so
