recall, you know, hearing a discourse on Christ's feeling when he rode into Jerusalem on the ass. I have known a man in the Harvard pulpit who tried to enter into the mind of Christ rather, you know, than into that of the ass . . . Heaven knows we could have spent three years on Milton. . . . Now, Hobbes, whatever else the fellow was, you know, was a big, hotblooded Elizabethan. When he gets onto God it's rather funny. You can't get the size of God's finger nails; it's no use trying. Abstract right was as purely a thing of the imagination as the finger nails of God. . . . Now, Baxter gives you, like all these Puritans, you know, an account of all his infernal maladies. They fancied, you know, that prayer and fasting could move their bowels. Baxter tried it. In the morning he was saved. There was another case where God interfered. . . . The Puritans were capable of great junks of attention to godly matters; it was as natural to them as eight hours of sleep are to me. . . . God knows what positive truth is. God knows that the effort to make idealism prevail in this world came to grief."
There speaks Barrett Wendell of the later time, being himself in the class-room. That is the Wendell who said: "The dominant figure in any time is sure to be of it." That is the Wendell who recognized Tolstoy as the greatest realist of the age; Wagner as the greatest artist of modern times; Whitman as a man who could "make you feel for a moment how even the ferryboats plying from New York to Brooklyn are fragments of God's eternity"; and "Huckleberry Finn" as "that amazing Odyssey of the Mississippi." That is the Wendell who found our New England literature pallid with our "national inexperience"; who was
