When Parker's society paid tribute to his memory after his death, Emerson gave an address full of love and sympathy for his heroic friend. "It is plain to me, he said, that he has achieved an historic immortality here; that he has so woven himself in these few years into the history of Boston, that he can never be left out of your annals." "His commanding merit as a reformer is this, that he insisted beyond all men in pulpits, - I can not think of one rival, that the essence of Christianity is its practical morals." In this opinion Emerson entirely sympathized with him; and he must have been drawn to Parker on this very account, and charmed with his perfect loyalty to manhood and right. Emerson's generous appreciation of Walt Whitman has been the cause of much comment; and it is understood he has somewhat retreated from his first ardent praise, and been mortified that that praise should have been made public. In 1855 he wrote Whitman the following letter:

"I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our Western wits fat and mean.

“I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.

"I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.

"I did not know until I last night saw the book advertised in a newspaper that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks and visiting New York to pay you my respects."

On receipt of this letter Whitman put these words on the cover of his Leaves of Grass: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." This use of a private

letter, and parading of his own praise, together with Whitman's excessive sensuousness of expression, undoubtedly abated Emerson's admiration. He has said that Whitman's first poems were much better than the later. The truth of this opinion may be doubted, however; for there is none of that coarse sensuality in the later poems which characterized the ea: lier, and there is an immense gain in depth of spiritual power. Some of these more recent poems have a remarkable power, and are unsurpassed in the intensity and sweep of their expression. But he is very unequal, and has printed in his books a great amount of rubbish. There is much in Whitman which Emerson must admire, and much which must be repugnant to his correct and puritanic taste, as well as to his exacting moral perceptions. Though there is not a line in Whitman which is necessarily immoral, there is a quite unnecessary plainness of speech, and an open fleshliness, that have made him repugnant to many. Doubtless Emerson's praise was sincere, but the new poetry was not of that kind with which he finds himself in fullest sympathy.

In the first volume of The Dial, Emerson introduced to the public the poetry of William Ellery Channing, with words of sympathetic praise.1 Channing had not yet printed any thing, Emerson's numerous selections from his manuscripts being the first to appear. He said of these poems,

"Our first feeling on reading them was a lively joy. So, then, the Muse is neither dead nor dumb, but has found a voice in these cold Cisatlantic states. Here is poetry which asks no aid of magnitude or number, of blood or crime, but finds theater enough in the first field or brookside, breadth and depth enough in the flow of its own thought. Here is self-repose, which to our mind is stabler than the Pyramids; here is self-respect, which leads a man to date from his heart more proudly than from Rome. Here is love which sees through surface, and adores the gentle nature and not costume. Here is religion, which is not of the church of England, nor of the church of Boston. Here is the good, wise heart, which sees that the end of culture is strength and cheerfulness. In an age, too, which tends with so strong an inclination to

1 New Poetry, in the second number.

the philosophical muse, here is poetry more intellectual than any American verses we have yet seen, distinguished from all competition by two merits, the fineness of perception; and the poet's trust in his own genius to that degree, that there is an absence of all conventional imagery, and a bold use of that which the moment's mood had made sacred to him, quite careless that it might be sacred to no other, and might even be slightly ludicrous to the first reader."

His name also served to bring before the public Channing's Wanderer, a poem mainly characterized by its appreciation of nature and by its biographic accounts of Emerson and Thoreau. In the preface to that poem he says, "there is new matter and new spirit in this writing." "These poems are genuinely original, with a simplicity of plan which allows the writer to leave out all the prose of artificial transitions.' "His poems have to me and others an exceptional value for this reason, we have not been considered in their composition, but either defied or forgotten, and therefore consult them securely as photographs.'

XVII.

POETRY.

THEODORE PARKER once said that Emerson is a poet lacking the accomplishment of verse. His poems lack in that smooth, polished, well-trimmed, and proportioned flow of words which characterizes so much of the poetry of the present time. As a poet he is simple, natural, and original; but giving less heed to form than to substance, caring more for the inward beauty than for the clothing of his muse. He has been too original, too true and just to his own genius, to copy from any of the poetical models in fashion during the century. They are too diffuse, gorgeous, and strained, too much concerned for outward beauty and mere melody of form, to please him; and the real place he occupies is with Milton, Herbert, Marvell, and the Elizabethan poets. His love for those pcets shows his natural affiliation with them; there he has found his models; and his stoic economy of words, purity of style, and simplicity of thought, all remind us of those noble singers. His moral tone, so lofty, so pure, recalls their puritanic sympathies. He is thoroughly a moral poet; never loves beauty merely for its own sake. He has the quiet and earnest manner of all great moral poets, the steady sense of the value of life, and the constant regard to its wellordering, which the word-flourish, and lively color, and dilletanteism, of much of the present poetry make impossible.

He is an introspective poet, with great power of giving expression to some of the moods and tendencies of the human mind. He deals with the riddles of being in a lofty spirit. The dark problems of life which concern every soul, and the solution of which forms the eras of

human thought, he brings into his poems with rare power, and with a skill few possess. He thus becomes a true interpreter of human motives. His muse turns wholly inward in some of his poems; and the great outward world, at other times so dear, is quite forgotten. He treats of mental experiences, moral purposes, spiritual aspirations, in a happy manner. Yet he speaks rather through the imagination than the heart, is an intellectual more than a sentimental poet. Emotion and passion do not enter largely into his poetry. He has feeling, and great depth of it; but it is not directly expressed. There is much of the Puritan about him, an austere distrust of emotion. He is usually calm, reposeful, earnest with faith, and without the rushes and surges of emotion or the ecstasies of passion.

"His feeling has the quality of depth and earnestness, sometimes hinting at a certain Hebrew solemnity rather than of ardent sympathy. He is not apt to take his readers into friendly counsel; rarely does he draw them near his heart; but rather speaks to them in his grand, austere tones from some lofty height of isolation. Not a trace of effeminacy, of the weak indulgence of even the purest passion, ever impairs the conscious serenity of his spirit. His inspiration flows from the intellect, or rather from the supreme poetic faculty, to a far greater degree than from the affections. Still, he is not without frequent touches of the tenderest pathos."1

Emerson has a theory of poetry, and in accordance with it most of his poems have been written. It is, that mind is central, the source of an infinite unity; that the outward world is symbolical of the spirit expressed through it, and that every fact in nature carries the whole sense of nature. He sees a deep and subtle relation between the physical universe and the soul of man. The world is a symbol, an expression to the senses, of spirit; and every outward fact must be interpreted in terms of the inward life. This idea powerfully appeals to his imagination, sets his mind aglow with analogies, and stimulates to the subtlest spiritual interpretations of nature. It gives a mystic character to his poetry, and makes many of his poems seem as obscure at first

1 Article by E. P. Whipple in The Independent for 1867.