try of them, but the moral law makes poetry
of him. He sees in the world only the ethical, but he sees it through
the aesthetic faculty. Hence his page has the double charm of the
beautiful and the good.

II

One of the penalties Emerson pays for his sharp decision, his mental
pertinence and resistance, is the curtailment of his field of vision and
enjoyment. He is one of those men whom the gods drive with blinders on,
so that they see fiercely in only a few directions. Supreme lover as he
is of poetry,--Herrick's poetry,--yet from the whole domain of what may
be called emotional poetry, the poetry of fluid humanity, tallied by
music, he seems to be shut out. This may be seen by his reference
to Shelley in his last book, "Letters and Social Aims," and by
his preference of the metaphysical poet throughout his writings.
Wordsworth's famous "Ode" is, he says, the high-water mark of English
literature. What he seems to value most in Shakespeare is the marvelous
wit, the pregnant sayings. He finds no poet in France, and in his
"English Traits" credits Tennyson with little but melody and color. (In
our last readings, do we not surely come to feel the manly and robust
fibre beneath Tennyson's silken vestments?) He demands of poetry that
it be a kind of spiritual manna, and is at last forced to confess that
there are no poets, and that when such angels do appear, Homer and
Milton will be tin pans.

One feels that this will not do, and that health, and wholeness, and
the well-being of man are more in the keeping of Shakespeare than in the
hands of Zoroaster or any of the saints. I doubt if that rarefied air
will make good red blood and plenty of it.

But Emerson makes his point plain, and is not indebted to any of his
teachers for it. It is the burden of all he writes upon the subject. The
long discourse that opens his last volume [footnote: _Letters and Social
Aims_] has numerous subheadings, as "Poetry," "Imagination," "Creation,"
"Morals," and "Transcendency;" but it's all a plea for transcendency. I
am reminded of the story of an old Indian chief who was invited to some
great dinner where the first course was "succotash." When the second
course was ready the old Indian said he would have a little more
succotash, and when the third was ready he called for more succotash and
so with the fourth and fifth, and on to the end. In like manner Emerson
will have nothing but the "spiritual law" in poetry, and he has an
enormo