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incongruities, and carelessness. Most of them are wanting in melody, many in syntax: the writer seems to trust to Providence for his rhymes, and changes his metres at will. Nevertheless, in both the volumes of his poetry there are poems. His genius has a lyric side, and the imaginative sympathy with nature and men like himself, which makes his prose poetical, prevents his verse, even when awkward, from becoming prosaic. The rippling of rivers, the sough of the pine, the murmur of the harvest, and the whir of insects, pervade and give life to his descriptions. A morning light is thrown over his happiest pages. He sings like Shelley of the

stars and the earth: the delicate touches in some of his quieter reflective pictures are not unworthy of the author of the Excursion. All men occasionally become either dull or ridiculous: Mr. Emerson avoids the first; he is guilty of repetition, but seldom of diffuseness, and though sometimes verging on absurdity, he steers clear of platitude. These poems reveal him on another side generally concealed from us-that which has to do with home affections. Interleaved between the gold-dust drifts of Alexandrian and Persian mysticism, there are pieces that speak of a love that is neither "initial," "demoniac," nor "celestial," but human, and the consciousness of a common share in common joys and griefs. Of these the Dirge, In Memoriam, the Farewell, the lines to J. W., to Ellen, and the Threnody, are the most conspicuous. In the last the Idealist mourns over an irreparable loss, for which he finds but a partial consolation in his philosophy—

"The eager fate which carried thee
Took the largest part of me;
For this losing is true dying,
This is lordly man's down-lying,
This his slow but sure reclining,
Star by star his world resigning.

"O child of paradise,

Boy who made dear his father's home,

In whose deep eyes

Men read the welfare of the times to come,

I am too much bereft :

The world dishonoured thou hast left.

O truth's and nature's costly lie!

O trusted broken prophecy !

O richest fortune sourly crossed!

Born for the future, to the future lost.”

But the prevailing tone of the more intelligible part of these volumes is cheerful. The Woodnotes which, under this and other names, occupy so much of their space, are those of the lark rather than the nightingale.

"Thousand minstrels woke within me,
Our music's in the hills,"

is the perpetual refrain of the exulting worshipper of Nature. Camping among the Adirondacs, welcoming the May, or putting his garden into song, he keeps his new American faith

"When the forest shall mislead me,

When the night and morning lie,
When sea and land refuse to feed me,
"Twill be time enough to die:
Then will yet my mother yield
A pillow in her greenest field,
Nor the June flowers scorn to cover
The clay of her departed lover."

In the same strain-that of Quarles or Andrew Marvell at their best is his well known Good-bye, proud world, I'm going home; but the Puritanism of older days has here taken on another shape. To counterbalance this hermit-like spirit, there are other pieces relating to the intercourse of men with each other, showing a keen observation of practical life, and weighing its gains and losses-sound worldly wisdom in neat quatrains, and a few trumpet calls of liberty. The Hymn sung at the completion of the Concord monument is thoroughly

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patriotic, and at the same time strong and dignified; while the verses written immediately before and during the late war address the whole nation, in forcible terms both of warning and encouragement. Those practical manifestoes are the more striking from the fact that they are printed by the side of others proclaiming, in transcendental enigmas, the indifferentism of all transitory things, the fixity of Fate, and the doctrine of the absorption of the individual in the Infinite. Most readers of Mr. Emerson's earlier volume of verse have puzzled over The Sphinx. Let them endeavour to unravel the following lines from his May-Day, entitled Brahma:

"If the red slayer think he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know well the subtle ways
I keep and pass and turn again.

"Far or forgot to me is near;

Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanquished gods to me appear,

And one to me are shame and fame.

"They reckon ill who leave me out;

When me they fly I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

"The strong gods pine for my abode,

And pine in vain the sacred seven ;

But thou, meek lover of the good!

Find me, and turn thy back on heaven."

Almost everything our author has written is excellent in parts, but he has produced no consummate whole we have in all his work spontaneity, sagacity, and vivacity, imperfectly harmonised with a love of abstraction.

The extracts we have given, within the limited compass of our review, sufficiently illustrate the fact that Mr. Emerson is singularly unequal as a Critic. For penetration, subtilty, and conclusiveness, some of his estimates of men and things

have never been surpassed. They are frequently most felicitous, at all times fresh and genuine, and expressed with a racy vigour, though, on some occasions, with an unpruned violence. On the other hand, this freshness is often purchased by a lack of knowledge. Hobbes confessed that he owed much of his originality to the restricted range of his reading. Emerson often owes his apparent force to the limitations of his thought. His eye is keen, but its range is comparatively narrow; and his deficiencies of vision are the more injurious that they generally escape his own observation. Unconsciously infected by the haste which he condemns in his countrymen, he looks at other nations through the folding telescope of a tourist. His English Traits abound in trenchant epigrams, but though they pay an amply generous tribute to English greatness, they miss-in many important particulars the salient points both for good and evil of English character. The following sentence is surely misleading, as well as slightly confused. "The religion of England is part of good breeding. When you see on the Continent the welldressed Englishman come into his ambassador's chapel, and put his face for silent prayer into his well-brushed hat, one cannot help feeling how much national pride prays with him and the religion of a gentleman." Mr. Emerson's taste is constantly at fault: an incessant straining after bon-mots mars his judgment as much as it vitiates his style; and his love of directness, pushed to an extreme, leads him over the confines of fact, as well as the reservations of fashion; into reckless caricature. A dogmatist, in spite of the impulsive inconsistencies which ought to be fatal to dogmatism, his judgments of those whose lives and writings do not square with his theories are for the most part valueless; and when he does injustice to his adversaries, his tacit assumption that all wise men must agree with him only adds to the offence. When, for instance, he asserts that "Locke is as surely the

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influx of decomposition and prose as Bacon and the Platonists of growth," or declares that Mr. Wilkinson's prefaces to the translations of Swedenborg "throw all the contemporary philosophy of England into the shade," or says contemptuously of the sensational school, ""Tis of no importance what bats and oxen think," or writes of his converse with Landor, "He pestered me with Southey; but who is Southey?" he shows either ignorance or flippancy. His praise of Bacon, with whose method he has no real sympathy, seems to prove that he has never understood the position of the founder of inductive science. His own motto is rather plus intra than plus ultra, and his idea of Truth is not so much the correspondence of thought with things, or a knowledge of their forms, as the agreement of the mind with itself. He utterly rejects the Idola Theatri, but not unfrequently falls a prey to all the others. He seldom ventures on verbal criticism; and in dealing with foreign languages he betrays the weakness of his scholarship. Though he is a professed Platonist, his essay on Plato is, in some respects, his poorest. He seems to have read him in Mr. Bohn's translations, which he pronounces "excellent." One qualification for a good critic is a well-defined artistic standard, another is the dramatic capacity of placing himself for the time in the position of the person who is being criticised. Mr. Emerson has neither of these. In reviewing an author he seems to skim his works, and ask how far the results arrived at coincide with a preconceived idea. With the spirit of a fearless inquirer, he unfortunately blends so much presumption as to feel an absolute indifference regarding the opinions of others, and this, in excess, constitutes a moral as well as an artistic defect. Thought is free, and the expression of it ought to be so; but when our thought wanders very far from that of the majority of wise and good men, we are bound to watch it with more than ordinary care, to sift its conclusions, and at least to state them moderately. Mr. Emerson's