clear: the young man looks as if he has something secret about him. But to call him a “secret” man is an indefensible foreshortening. I do not mean that the author should have used an overprecise sentence like “The man looked as if he had a secret”; to be overprecise here would be out of the emotional key. And it is difficult to maintain clarity while conveying a strong emotional mood. But it is not proper to convey it by means of bad grammar. An old literary bromide says that when you write about boring people, you, the writer, do not have to be boring. The same applies here: you cannot convey an incoherent emotion by means of incoherent writing.
Incidentally, the one good line up to this point is in the preceding sentence: “to stand here at this ship’s great side, here at the huge last edge of evening and return.” An evening and a return do not literally have an edge, but here one need not be grammatically pedantic. This whole passage is preceded by the description of a ship docking in the evening, and therefore the meaning of “the huge last edge of evening and return” is clear: the vastness of returning home in the evening. Here Wolfe does combine an emotion with a specific, physical description.,
But then he repeats the same trick, very badly: “he bends there at the rail of night.” This is too foreshortened.
Next, the author states one idea three times by means of synonyms: “his eyes are starved, his soul is parched with thirst, his heart is famished with a hunger that cannot be fed.” This is an example of not writing by means of essences. If Wolfe wanted to convey the idea of spiritual hunger, and convey it strongly, his task was to find the strongest expression he could for such a hunger. His dilemma here was that none of these metaphors is strong enough by itself to convey what he wanted. But stating something three times does not make it stronger; it makes it three times weaker.
The last part of this sentence contains some specific meaning, and it is almost good: “he is mad for love and is athirst for glory, and he is so cruelly mistaken—and so right!” Here the author indicates what about the man impresses the woman. With direct simplicity, the sentence conveys her impression of him, her estimate of his future, and her philosophy (her view is that he is right to expect love and glory, but is destined for disappointment—which indicates a malevolent view of the universe on her part). The author says something specific, and he says it once. If, in the preceding, he had given some grounds for the woman’s conclusion by describing the man’s face or expression, this would have been a good sentence.
“Oh passionate and proud!—how like the wild, lost soul of youth you are, how like my wild lost father who will not return!” The reference to the woman’s father spoils the emotional mood of the passage and destroys the preceding description of the young man, which emphasizes his youth, ambition, and future. A hymn to a woman’s first meeting with her beloved cannot end on a family recollection. That is a real anticlimax.
Then the meeting is taken up from the standpoint of the young man. “He turned, and saw her then, and so finding her, was lost, and so losing self, was found.” Again, the author is playing for effect by means of words instead of content. It takes minutes to figure out what the sentence means: “Well, finding her, he was lost. How? Oh, by falling in love. Losing self, he was found. By whom?”
“He never knew: he only knew that from that moment his spirit was impaled upon the knife of love.” This is an extremely ugly image: it connotes meat on a skewer or a soldier in a bad movie falling on a sword through his stomach. Admittedly, the metaphor is philosophical: the author regards love as a knife because it leads to disaster. But to make it so specific that one sees the man’s spirit falling on that knife is inexcusably ugly.
“From that moment on he never was again to lose her utterly, never to wholly re-possess unto himself the lonely, wild integrity of youth which had been his.” Observe the overuse of the word wild. It is bad to “ride” a word—to use it over and over, so that the reader becomes conscious of the repetition.