in commissioning, to glorify all this earth of ours, the beneficent Spirit of Beauty:

Guest of million painted forms,
Which in turn thy glory warms!
The frailest leaf, the mossy bark,
The acorn's cup, the rainbow's arc,
The swinging spider's silver line,
The ruby of the drop of wine,
The shining pebble of the pond,
Thou inscribest with a bond,

In thy momentary play,

Would bankrupt nature to repay.18

Happy, here and there, a man who has learnt to enjoy the feast prepared for him :

And such I knew, a forest seer,
A minstrel of the natural year,

A lover true, who knew by heart
Each joy the mountain dales impart;
It seemed that nature could not raise
A plant in any secret place,
In quaking bog, on snowy hill,

Beneath the grass that shades the rill,
But he would come in the very hour
It opened in its virgin bower,
As if a sunbeam showed the place,
And tell its long-descended race.
What others did at distance hear,
And guessed within the thicket's gloom,
Was showed to this philosopher,
And at his bidding seemed to come.19

I am not concerned to expound the philosophy, which, generous, self-denying, reverent, as, in its own way, it is, produces a prevailing impression, less of open day, than of a gorgeous sunset. As little do I care to defend the habit of trimming verse to fit the thought, instead of harmonizing both. But, whatever the differences in form and diction between Emerson and better-recognized poets, at all events in one respect he can meet them on equal terms. With the greatest he shares the quality of passionate earnestness. Passion is an essential characteristic of pure poetry. A necessity of verse meant to move is that it shall have moved its author first. He must have been a little mad before his readers will feel the hurrying fire within themselves. Philosophy embodied in verse usually is heedless of this condition. Hence the disfavour with lovers of poetry under which commonly it labours. With Emerson thought of the profoundest acknowledges no servile obligation to be temperate and tame. That was not his nature.

The lovely dirge in which he laments his dead brothers amid the scenes they loved, itself glows throughout with a warm, clinging tenderness :

In the long sunny afternoon,

The plain was full of ghosts;

I wandered up, I wandered down,
Beset by pensive hosts.

The winding Concord gleamed below,
Pouring as wide a flood

As when my brothers, long ago,

Came with me to the wood.

But they are gone-the holy ones
Who trod with me this lovely vale;

The strong, star-bright companions
Are silent, low, and pale.

They coloured the horizon round;

Stars flamed and faded as they bade;
All echoes hearkened for their sound,
They made the woodlands glad or mad.
I touch this flower of silken leaf,

Which once our childhood knew ;
Its soft leaves wound me with a grief
Whose balsam never grew.
Hearken to yon pine-warbler
Singing aloft in the tree!
Hearest thou, O traveller,

What he singeth to me?

'Go, lonely man,' it saith;

'They loved thee from their birth;

Their hands were pure, and pure their faith,—

There are no such hearts on earth.

You cannot unlock your heart,

The key is gone with them;

The silent organ loudest chants

The master's requiem.' 20

But the fire and flame of fancy he reserved for explorations of the Incomprehensible. In the majestic hymn, or treatise, in which he seems determined to prove by explaining it, that Godhead, as imagined in his scheme of Being, is inexplicable, he falls into an ecstasy :

This vault which glows immense with light
Is the inn where he lodges for a night.
What recks such Traveller if the bowers
Which bloom and fade like meadow flowers

A bunch of fragrant lilies be,

Or the stars of eternity?

Alike to him the better, the worse,-
The glowing angel, the outcast corse.
Thou metest him by centuries,
And lo! he passes like the breeze;
Thou seek'st in globe and galaxy,
He hides in pure transparency;

Thou askest in fountains and in fires,-
He is the essence that inquires.

He is the axis of the star,

He is the sparkle of the spar,

He is the heart of every creature,

He is the meaning of each feature ;

And his mind is the sky,

Than all it holds more deep, more high.21

Thought, as it flows from him, turns into red-hot steam. The heat is no occasional accident; it is an inherent property. Philosophy in such guise may well claim for itself the prerogatives and honours of poetic inspiration; and none who study Emerson's verse will refuse them to it and him.

The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Five vols. (vol. iv: Letters, Social Aims, Poems). Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1882. Also The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Two vols. (vol. i, The Poems). London: G. Bell & Sons, 1879.

1 Merops, vol. i, p. 471 (1879 ed.).

2 Saadi, vol. iv, p. 39 (1882 ed.).

3 The Apology, vol. i, p. 466 (1879 ed.).

4 Woodnotes, vol. iv, pp. 134–5 (1882 ed.).

5 Forerunners, vol. iv, pp. 68–9 (ibid.).

• Bacchus, vol. iv, p. 118 (ibid.).

7 Merlin, vol. iv, p. 116 (ibid.).

Ibid., vol. iv, p. 114 (ibid.).

• The Problem, vol. iv, pp. 14–15 (ibid.).

10 The Sphinx, vol. iv, p. 11 (ibid.).

11 Initial, Dæmonic, and Celestial Love, vol. iv. pp. 104–5 (ibid.).

12 Give all to Love, vol. iv, p. 451 (ibid.).

13 Each and All, vol. iv, p. 12 (ibid.).

14 The World-Soul, p. 27 (ibid.).

15 The Hamatreya, pp. 70-1 (ibid.).

16 The Rhodora, p. 58 (ibid.).
17 The Humble-bee, p. 59 (ibid.).
18 Ode to Beauty, pp. 80–1 (ibid.).
19 Woodnotes, iv, pp. 127-8 (ibid.).

20 Dirge, p. 188–9 (1882 ed.).
21 Woodnotes, ii, p. 140 (ibid.).

EDGAR ALLAN POE

1811-1849

We see

THEY are all dreams, if manufactured dreams-The Raven, Lenore, The Bells, Annabel Lee, Eulalie, Ulalume, Dreamland, The City in the Sea, A Dream within a Dream, For Annie, Bridal Ballad, Israfel, To Helen. things happening, being done, being suffered. We hear words. We speak them. Though we are there only because we are subject or object, we know we have nothing in reality to do with the whole. We are conscious that it is an illusion from which we are sure to wake up, if once we can shake ourselves. Throughout the entire range of poetry nothing like it is to be found; not Christabel Kubla Khan may compare, though chiefly by way of contrast of the spontaneity in it with the artifice in Poe. In prose some of De Quincey's visions might stand in the same line, were they not pervaded by a palpable reasonableness. Poe's in a sense have neither thought nor feeling; and in a sense they are nothing else. Somewhere, several years ago, a writer supposed Man to possess, or be possessed by, two souls; one immortal, a heavenly spark; the other at any rate not heavenly, and certainly mortal, capable of dying with the flesh. That is the sort of soul which animates Poe's verse, if not himself.

The grace and melody of most of his few poems are indisputable, and all but impossible to analyse and define. The charm is as inscrutable. In The Raven wave after wave of solemn mystery keeps rolling up. There is the opening scene: