Chief Justice Fuller said with singular felicity:
"Mr. Justice Lamar always underrated himself. This tendency
plainly sprung from a vivid imagination. With him the splendid
passions attendant upon youth never faded into the light of
common day, but they kept before him as an ideal, the impossibility
of whose realization, as borne in upon him from time to time,
opposed him with a sense of failure. Yet the conscientiousness
of his work was not lessened, nor was the acuteness of his
intellect obscured by these natural causes of his discontent;
nor did a certain Oriental dreaminess of the temperament ever
allure him to abandon the effort to accomplish something that
would last after his lips were dumb."
Matthew Arnold says in one of his essays that Americans lack
distinction. I have a huge liking for Matthew Arnold. He
had a wonderful intellectual vision. I do not mean to say
that his three lectures on translating Homer are the greatest
literary work of our time. But I think, on the whole, that
I should rather have the pair of intellectual eyes which can
see Homer as he saw him, than any other mental quality I can
think of.
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