ve pleasure,
Or Shakespeare whom no mind can measure,
Nor Collins' verse of tender pain,
Nor Byron's clarion of disdain,
Scott, the delight of generous boys,
Or Wordsworth, Pan's recording voice,--
Not one of all can put in verse,
Or to this presence could rehearse
The sights and voices ravishing
The boy knew on the hills in spring."--

In the notice of "Parnassus" some of his preferences have been already
mentioned.

Comparisons between men of genius for the sake of aggrandizing the
one at the expense of the other are the staple of the meaner kinds of
criticism. No lover of art will clash a Venetian goblet against a Roman
amphora to see which is strongest; no lover of nature undervalues a
violet because it is not a rose. But comparisons used in the way of
description are not odious.

The difference between Emerson's poetry and that of the contemporaries
with whom he would naturally be compared is that of algebra and
arithmetic. He deals largely in general symbols, abstractions, and
infinite series. He is always seeing the universal in the particular.
The great multitude of mankind care more for two and two, something
definite, a fixed quantity, than for _a_ + _b's_ and _x^{2's}_,--symbols
used for undetermined amounts and indefinite possibilities. Emerson is
a citizen of the universe who has taken up his residence for a few days
and nights in this travelling caravansary between the two inns that
hang out the signs of Venus and Mars. This little planet could not
provincialize such a man. The multiplication-table is for the every day
use of every day earth-people, but the symbols he deals with are
too vast, sometimes, we must own, too vague, for the unilluminated
terrestrial and arithmetical intelligence. One cannot help feeling that
he might have dropped in upon us from some remote centre of spiritual
life, where, instead of addition and subtraction, children were taught
quaternions, and where the fourth dimension of space was as familiarly
known to everybody as a foot-measure or a yard-stick is to us. Not that
he himself dealt in the higher or the lower mathematics, but he saw the
hidden spiritual meaning of things as Professor Cayley or Professor
Sylvester see the meaning of their mysterious formulae. Without using
the Rosetta-stone of Swedenborg, Emerson finds in every phenomenon of
nature a hieroglyphic. Others measure and describe the monuments,--he
reads the sacred inscriptions. How alive