s. 'There is merit without
elevation,' says La Rochefoucauld, 'but there is no elevation without
some merit.' Such we find him in his earlier essays, while he had as yet
only grasped at the Pantheistic wing of the Egyptian globe. In England,
in 1848, four thousand people crowded Exeter Hall, to hear the champion
of free thought from America. In Poland, men who knew him only by some
fragments in a Polish review, considered him the thinker of the age. His
courage was the talisman that won him admiration, and his earnestness,
visible through the veil of arrogance and petty affectations, secured
respect.

In _Representative Men_, the old Plato-worship illumined by
Schelling--_Wissenschaften_--is the key-note, and _English Traits_ is
the record of impressions received during the _Sturm und Drang_, or
rather 'cloud-compelling' days of the _Dial_ and _Essay_ developments. A
volume of _Poems_, published in 1856, recalls the old landmarks. If they
are rich in thought, they are also luxuriant in labyrinthine sentences
that puzzle even the initiated in the Ziph language. A thought once
extricated from a maze of inversion and entangled particles,

'we are in pain
To think how to unthink that thought again.'

As a poet, Emerson is careless in versification. Like Friar John, of the
Funnels, he does not rhyme in crimson. His imagination is too bold to be
confined by the petty limits of trochee or iambus. Consequently his
pictures, when he condescends to paint, present rather a mass of
brilliant coloring than the well-finished detail that we demand in a
work of art. We look in vain in his poems for that effort of identity
between the conscious and the unconscious activities that Schelling
calls the sole privilege of genius. 'The infinite (or perfect) presented
as the finite, is Beauty.' Yet the single poem 'Threnody' would
establish Emerson's title to a place among the guild of poets. It is
classically beautiful and faultless in mechanism. Its flow is that of a
river over sands of gold, its solemn monotone broken now and then by
_staccato_ plaints, and the tender gold of its shining waters dimmed by
dark shadows, as rock beneath or tree above assails the gentle stillness
of its onward flow. Only that which comes from the heart goes again to
the heart. We find a new and delicious personality, a simple Greek
naturalness, in this exquisite dirge that scarcely owns the 'blasphemy
of grief,' that are wanted in his sen