ilent flit through thee as
those through Concord plain." The substance of the next four stanzas
is in prose form also: "Thou art shut in thy banks; but the stream I
love, flows in thy water, and flows through rocks and through the air,
and through darkness, and through men, and women. I hear and see the
inundation and eternal spending of the stream, in winter and in
summer, in men and animals, in passion and thought. Happy are they who
can hear it"; and so on. In the poem these sentences become:

"Thou in thy narrow banks are pent:
The stream I love unbounded goes
Through flood and sea and firmament;
Through light, through life, it forward flows.

"I see the inundation sweet,
I hear the spending of the stream
Through years, through men, through Nature fleet,
Through love and thought, through power and dream."

It is evident that Emerson was a severe critic of his own work. He
knew when he had struck fire, and he knew when he had failed. He was
as exacting with himself as with others. His conception of the
character and function of the poet was so high that he found the
greatest poets wanting. The poet is one of his three or four
ever-recurring themes. He is the divine man. He is bard and prophet,
seer and savior. He is the acme of human attainment. Verse devoid of
insight into the method of nature, and devoid of religious emotion,
was to him but as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. He called Poe
"the jingle man" because he was a mere conjurer with words. The
intellectual content of Poe's works _was_ negligible. He was a wizard
with words and measures, but a pauper in ideas. He did not add to our
knowledge, he did not add to our love of anything in nature or in
life, he did not contribute to our contentment in the world--the
bread of life was not in him. What was in him was mastery over the
architectonics of verse. Emerson saw little in Shelley for the same
reason, but much in Herbert and Donne. Religion, in his sense of the
term,--the deep sea into which the streams of all human thought
empty,--was his final test of any man. Unless there was something
fundamental about him, something that savored of the primordial deep
of the universal spirit, he remained unmoved. The elemental azure of
the great bodies of water is suggestive of the tone and hue Emerson
demanded in great poetry. He found but little of it in the men of his
time: practically none in the contemporary poets of New Engl