University of Virginia Library

“It has, in the midst of faults, neither few nor small, an unequivocal originality
and young force and freshness of its own, vigorous in its very
rudeness and immaturity, together with a certain earnest spirit of Americanism
which comes to us like a breath of new life; of the west wind from
our lofty, fast-rooted American mountains, over the stagnant vapors of the
East—the East which blows that sirocco so deadly to American energy.”

“He writes not only like a man, but like a Republican and an American.
Under this rough bark is a heart of oak; and peradventure a noble vessel,
if not a Dodonean oracle, may presently be had out of it. The wood has
a good grain, the timber is of large size; and, if gnarled and knotted, these
are the conditions of strength, and perhaps the convulsions of growth. It
is thus that strong trees grow, while slim grasses spring smoothly from the
ground. And the thoughtful student of the literature of America will pause
naturally and musingly, at the sight of this little book, and mark it as something
`new and strange,' considering the circumstances of the soil.”