intellectual stimulation.

* * * * *

Emerson's poetry has given rise to much heart-burning and disagreement.
Some people do not like it. They fail to find the fire in the ice. On
the other hand, his poems appeal not only to a large number of
professed lovers of poetry, but also to a class of readers who find in
Emerson an element for which they search the rest of poesy in vain.

It is the irony of fate that his admirers should be more than usually
sensitive about his fame. This prophet who desired not to have
followers, lest he too should become a cult and a convention, and whose
main thesis throughout life was that piety is a crime, has been calmly
canonized and embalmed in amber by the very forces he braved. He is
become a tradition and a sacred relic. You must speak of him under your
breath, and you may not laugh near his shrine.

Emerson's passion for nature was not like the passion of Keats or of
Burns, of Coleridge or of Robert Browning; compared with these men he is
cold. His temperature is below blood-heat, and his volume of poems
stands on the shelf of English poets like the icy fish which in Caliban
upon Setebos is described as finding himself thrust into the warm ooze
of an ocean not his own.

But Emerson is a poet, nevertheless, a very extraordinary and rare man
of genius, whose verses carry a world of their own within them. They are
overshadowed by the greatness of his prose, but they are authentic. He
is the chief poet of that school of which Emily Dickinson is a minor
poet. His poetry is a successful spiritual deliverance of great
interest. His worship of the New England landscape amounts to a
religion. His poems do that most wonderful thing, make us feel that we
are alone in the fields and with the trees,--not English fields nor
French lanes, but New England meadows and uplands. There is no human
creature in sight, not even Emerson is there, but the wind and the
flowers, the wild birds, the fences, the transparent atmosphere, the
breath of nature. There is a deep and true relation between the
intellectual and almost dry brilliancy of Emerson's feelings and the
landscape itself. Here is no defective English poet, no Shelley without
the charm, but an American poet, a New England poet with two hundred
years of New England culture and New England landscape in him.

People are forever speculating upon what will last, what posterity will
approve, and some people believe t