Hugh Miller / by W. Keith Leask.

William Keith Leask

Date:: [pref. 1896]

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hugh Miller / by W. Keith Leask. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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power, and to his great gifts as a stylist. Few men of science have had graces of style. In Darwin it is lacking, and he has himself set on record that literature and art had ceased for him to exert any influence, and that a mere novel had become the highest form of intellectual amusement. Hutton needed a Playfair to make him intelligible, as Dugald Stewart was needed for the exposition of Reid. But it is this power that will keep Miller alive. His views upon the Old Red Sandstone, on the Noachian Deluge, on the Mosaic Cosmogony, may be right or wrong. But they have the sure merit of abiding literature, and men highly en- dowed with this gift have a lasting and assured fame. Mr. Lowell has declared Clough to be the true poet of the restlessness of the later half of the century, and Tennyson to be but its pale reflex. But the answer is ready and invincible : Tennyson is read, and Clough is already on the shelf. As a piece of imaginative writing. The Old Red Sandstone is not likely to be soon sur- passed in its own line. ‘ I would give,’ we find Buckland declaring, ‘ my left hand to possess such powers of description as this man has.’ ‘ There is,’ says Carlyle, ‘ right genial fire, everywhere nobly tempered down with peaceful radical heat, which is very beautiful to see. Luminous, memorable; all wholesome, strong, fresh, and breezy, like the “ Old Red Sandstone ” mountains in a sunny summer day.’ We doubt if a single page of Sedgwick, or of Buckland even in his Bridgewater Treatise, be read—at least as literature. But a man.

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