Longfellow and Emerson, for example, was not shyness of nature wholly, but stood for the real aloofness of his mind from their ways of life, from the things that absorbed them in their poetic and speculative activity; it is but another example, if it is added that he took no interest in public affairs, truly speaking. He was a Democrat, but that does not fully account for his indifference to those philanthropies which his literary friends shared; for, as a party man, he was not zealous. His nature was torpid in all these ways; there was dullness of temperament, indifference to all except the one thing in which he truly lived, his artistic nature; and here he was an observer, using an objective method with as little indebtedness to personal experience as ever artist had. His reserve amounted to suppression; and, in fact, his personal life was not of the sort that must find a voice. He seemed to feel that the "Twice-Told Tales," at least, which he described as "memorials of tranquil and not unhappy years," had contracted some faintness of life from their author's mind, as if a low vital tone characterized them, owing to his incapacity to yield himself with fullness of power even to this reflective or creative art:—
"They have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade,—the coolness of a meditative habit, which diffuses itself through the feeling and observation of every sketch. Instead of passion there is sentiment; and, even in what
