ed
them "cockatrices," "asps," or "flying serpents;" "literary men" will
not agree that they are "conjurers and charlatans," and will not listen
with patience to the praises of a man who so called them. As for the
poets, they can take their choice of Emerson's poetical or prose
estimate of the great Mystic, but they cannot very well accept both. In
"The Test," the Muse says:--

"I hung my verses in the wind,
Time and tide their faults may find;
All were winnowed through and through,
Five lines lasted good and true ...
Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
Nor time unmake what poets know.
Have you eyes to find the five
Which five hundred did survive?"

In the verses which follow we learn that the five immortal poets
referred to are Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, _Swedenborg_, and Goethe.

And now, in the Essay we have just been looking at, I find that "his
books have no melody, no emotion, no humor, no relief to the dead
prosaic level. We wander forlorn in a lack-lustre landscape. No bird
ever sang in these gardens of the dead. The entire want of poetry in so
transcendent a mind betokens the disease, and like a hoarse voice in a
beautiful person, is a kind of warning." Yet Emerson says of him that
"He lived to purpose: he gave a verdict. He elected goodness as the clue
to which the soul must cling in this labyrinth of nature."

Emerson seems to have admired Swedenborg at a distance, but seen nearer,
he liked Jacob Behmen a great deal better.

"Montaigne; or, the Skeptic," is easier reading than the last-mentioned
Essay. Emerson accounts for the personal regard which he has for
Montaigne by the story of his first acquaintance with him. But no other
reason was needed than that Montaigne was just what Emerson describes
him as being.

"There have been men with deeper insight; but, one would say, never
a man with such abundance of thought: he is never dull, never
insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care for all that
he cares for.

"The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences.
I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the
language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words and
they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.--

"Montaigne talks with shrewdness, knows the world and books and
himself, and uses the positive degree; never shrieks, or protests,
or prays: no weakness, no convulsion, no superlativ