clearlier

Updated: May 9, 2025

And now, clearlier still, as I write in these after-years, do I see that dining-room of The Pines; the long white stretch of table-cloth, with Swinburne and Watts-Dunton and another at the extreme end of it; Watts-Dunton between us, very low down over his plate, very cosy and hirsute, and rather like the dormouse at that long tea-table which Alice found in Wonderland.

Sir Max Beerbohm - And Even Now

The most subtle piece of analysis, however, is Lowell's comparison between Emerson and Carlyle: "There are persons, mole-blind to the soul's make and style, Who insist on a likeness 'twixt him and Carlyle; To compare him with Plato would be vastly fairer, Carlyle's the more burly, but E. is the rarer; He sees fewer objects, but clearlier, truelier, If C.'s as original, E.'s more peculiar; That he's more of a man you might say of the one, Of the other he's more of an Emerson; C.'s the Titan, as shaggy of mind as of limb, E. the clear-eyed Olympian, rapid and slim; The one's two-thirds Norseman, the other half Greek, Where the one's most abounding, the other's to seek."

Frank Preston Stearns - Cambridge Sketches