with life. As the idealist declines to cross-examine those Emerson's facts which he regards as merely phenomenal, and looks optimism. upon this outward face of things as upon a mask not worthy to dismay the fixed soul, so the optimist turns away his eyes from the evil which he disposes of as merely negative, as the shadow of the good. Hawthorne's interest in the problem of sin finds little place in Emerson's philosophy. Passion comes not nigh him, and "Faust" disturbs him with its disagreeableness. Pessimism is to him "the only skepticism." The greatest literature is that which is most broadly human, or, in other words, that which will square best with all philosophies. But Emerson's genius was interpretative rather than constructive. The poet dwells in the cheerful world of phenomena. He is most the poet who realizes most intensely the good and the bad of human life. But idealism makes experience shadowy and subordinates action to contemplation. To it the cities of men, with their "frivolous populations," 66 are but sailing foam-bells Along thought's causing stream." Shakespeare does not forget that the world will one day vanish "like the baseless fabric of a vision," and that we ourselves are "such stuff as dreams are made on "; but this is not the mood in which he dwells. Again: while it is for the philosopher to reduce variety to unity, it is the poet's task to detect the manifold under uniformity. In the great creative poets, in Shakespeare and Dante and Goethe, how infinite the swarm of persons, the multitude of forms! But with Emerson the type is important, the common element. "In youth we are mad for persons. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing through them all." "The same-the same!" he exclaims in his essay on Plato. "Friend and Emerson's genius interpretative. "English Traits." foe are of one stuff; the plowman, the plow, and the furrow are of one stuff." And this is the thought in "Brahma " แ "They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly I am the wings; And I the hymn the Brahmin sings." It is not easy to fancy a writer who holds this attitude toward persons" descending to the composition of a novel or a play. Emerson showed, indeed, a fine power of character analysis in his "English Traits" and "Repre"Representa- sentative Men" and in his memoirs of Thoreau and Martive Men." garet Fuller. There is even a sort of dramatic humor in his portrait of Socrates. But upon the whole he stands midway between constructive artists, whose instinct it is to tell a story or sing a song, and philosophers, like Schelling, who give poetic expression to a system of thought. He belongs to the class of minds of which Sir Thomas Browne is the best English example. He set a high value upon Browne, to whose style his own, though far more sententious, bears a resemblance. Browne's saying, for example, "All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God," sounds like Emerson, whose workmanship, for the rest, in his prose essays was exceedingly fine and close. He was not afraid to be homely and racy in expressing thought of the highest spirituality. "Hitch your wagon to a star," is a good instance of his favorite manner. Emerson a poetphilosopher. His verse. Emerson's verse often seems careless in technique. Most of his pieces are scrappy and have the air of runic rimes, or little oracular "voicings"-as they say at Concord-in rhythmic shape, of single thoughts on "Worship," "Character," "Heroism," "Art," Politics," ""Culture," etc. The content is the important thing, and the form is too frequently awkward or bald. Sometimes, indeed, in the clear-obscure of Emerson's poetry, the deep wisdom of the thought finds its most natural expression in the imaginative simplicity of the language. But though this artlessness in him became too frequently in his imitators, like Thoreau and Ellery Channing, an obtruded simplicity, among his own poems are many that leave nothing to be desired in point of wording and of verse. His "Hymn The "Concord Hymn," 1836. Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument," in 1836, is the perfect model of an occasional poem. Its lines were on everyone's lips at the time of the centennial celebrations in 1876, and the "shot heard round the world " has hardly echoed farther than the song which chronicled it. Equally current is the stanza from "Voluntaries": "So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' The youth replies, I can.'" So, too, the famous lines from "The Problem": "The hand that rounded Peter's dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew ; "The Problem." The most noteworthy of Emerson's pupils was Henry Henry David David Thoreau, "the poet naturalist." After his gradu- Thoreau. ation from Harvard College, in 1837, Thoreau engaged in school-teaching and in the manufacture of lead-pencils, but soon gave up all regular business and devoted himself to walking, reading, and the study of nature. He was at one time private tutor in a family on Staten Island, and he supported himself for a season by doing odd jobs in landsurveying for the farmers about Concord. In 1845 he built, with his own hands, a small cabin on the banks of Walden Pond, near Concord, and lived there in seclusion for two hermitage. His Walden Published writings. His closeness to nature. His love of the wild. years. His expenses during these years were nine cents a "live all alone Close to the bone, And where life is sweet แ He He had a passion for the wild, and seems like an Anglo- and 66 saw beneath dim aisles in odorous beds, The slight linnæa hang its twin-born heads." He tried to interpret the thought of Ktaadn and to fathom the meaning of the billows on the back of Cape Cod, in their indifference to the shipwrecked bodies that they rolled ashore. “After sitting in my chamber many days, reading the poets, I have been out early on a foggy morning and heard the cry of an owl in the neighboring wood as from a nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by literature. None of the feathered race has yet realized my youthful conceptions of the woodland depths. I had seen the red election birds brought from their recesses on my comrade's string, and fancied that their plumage would assume stranger and more dazzling colors, like the tints of evening, in proportion as I advanced farther into the darkness and solitude of the forest. Still less have I seen such strong and wild tints on any poet's string." It was on the mystical side that Thoreau apprehended Thoreau a transcendentalism. Mysticism has been defined as the mystic. soul's recognition of its identity with nature. This thought lies plainly in Schelling's philosophy, and he illustrated it by his famous figure of the magnet. Mind and nature are one; they are the positive and negative poles of the magnet. In man, the Absolute-that is, God -becomes conscious of himself; makes of himself, as nature, an object to himself as mind. “The souls of men," said Schelling, 66 are but the innumerable individual eyes with which our infinite World-Spirit beholds himself." This thought is also clearly present in Emerson's view of nature, and has caused him to be accused of pantheism. But if by pantheism is meant the doctrine that the underlying principle of the universe is matter Schelling's or force, none of the transcendentalists was a panthe- idealism. ist. In their view nature was divine. Their poetry is always haunted by the sense of a spiritual reality which abides beyond the phenomena. Thus in Emerson's "Two Rivers": Resemblance of Emerson's and Thoreau's mysticism to pantheistic |