e heat and unconscious optimism of the great poet with deep
regret. But if man would not become emasculated, if human life is to
continue, we must cherish the coarse as well as the fine, the root as
well as the top and flower. The poet-priest in the Emersonian sense
has never yet appeared, and what reason have we to expect him? The poet
means life, the whole of life,--all your ethics and philosophies, and
essences and reason of things, in vital play and fusion, clothed with
form and color, and throbbing with passion: the priest means a part, a
thought, a precept; he means suppression, expurgation, death. To have
gone farther than Shakespeare would have been to cease to be a poet, and
to become a mystic or a seer.

Yet it would be absurd to say, as a leading British literary journal
recently did, that Emerson is not a poet. He is one kind of a poet. He
has written plenty of poems that are as melodious as the hum of a wild
bee in the air,--chords of wild aeolian music.

Undoubtedly his is, on the whole, a bloodless kind of poetry. It
suggests the pale gray matter of the cerebrum rather than flesh and
blood. Mr. William Rossetti has made a suggestive remark about him. He
is not so essentially a poet, says this critic, as he is a Druid that
wanders among the bards, and strikes the harp with even more than bardic
stress.

Not in the poetry of any of his contemporaries is there such a burden
of the mystery of things, nor are there such round wind-harp tones, nor
lines so tense and resonant, and blown upon by a breeze from the highest
heaven of thought. In certain respects he has gone beyond any other. He
has gone beyond the symbol to the thing signified. He has emptied poetic
forms of their meaning and made poetry of that. He would fain cut the
world up into stars to shine in the intellectual firmament. He is more
and he is less than the best.

He stands among other poets like a pine-tree amid a forest of oak and
maple. He seems to belong to another race, and to other climes and
conditions. He is great in one direction, up; no dancing leaves, but
rapt needles; never abandonment, never a tossing and careering, never
an avalanche of emotion; the same in sun and snow, scattering his cones,
and with night and obscurity amid his branches. He is moral first and
last, and it is through his impassioned and poetic treatment of the
moral law that he gains such an ascendency over his reader. He says, as
for other things he makes poe