nce and value especially in
certain fields of literature. I by no means would wish to water Emerson;
yet it will not do to lose sight of the fact that mass and inertia are
indispensable to the creator. Considering him as poet alone, I have
no doubt of his irremediable deficiency here. You cannot have broad,
massive effect, deep light and shade, or a torrent of power, with such
extreme refinement and condensation. The superphosphates cannot take the
place of the coarser, bulkier fertilizers. Especially in poetry do
we require pure thought to be well diluted with the human, emotional
qualities. In the writing most precious to the race, how little is
definition and intellectual formula, and how much is impulse, emotion,
will, character, blood, chyle! We must have liquids and gases and
solvents. We perhaps get more of them in Carlyle. Emerson's page
has more serene astral beauty than Carlyle's, but not that intense
blast-furnace heat that melts down the most obdurate facts and
characters into something plastic and poetical. Emerson's ideal is
always the scholar, the man of books and ready wit; Carlyle's hero is a
riding or striding ruler, or a master worker in some active field.

The antique mind no doubt affords the true type of health and wholeness
in this respect. The Greek could see, and feel, and paint, and carve,
and speak nothing but emotional man. In nature he saw nothing but
personality,--nothing but human or superhuman qualities; to him the
elements all took the human shape. Of that vague, spiritual, abstract
something which we call Nature he had no conception. He had no
sentiment, properly speaking, but impulse and will-power. And the
master minds of the world, in proportion to their strength, their spinal
strength, have approximated to this type. Dante, Angelo, Shakespeare,
Byron, Goethe, saw mainly man, and him not abstractly but concretely.
And this is the charm of Burns and the glory of Scott. Carlyle has
written the best histories and biographies of modern times, because he
sees man with such fierce and steadfast eyes. Emerson sees him also,
but he is not interested in him as a man, but mainly as a spirit, as a
demigod, or as a wit or a philosopher.

Emerson's quality has changed a good deal in his later writings. His
corn is no longer in the milk; it has grown hard, and we that read have
grown hard, too. He has now ceased to be an expansive, revolutionary
force, but he has not ceased to be a writer of extr