e to the end of the mood we are at the end of the poem.

There is no question that the power to throw your sitter into a
receptive mood by a pass or two which shall give you his virgin
attention is necessary to any artist. Nobody has the knack of this more
strongly than Emerson in his prose writings. By a phrase or a common
remark he creates an ideal atmosphere in which his thought has the
directness of great poetry. But he cannot do it in verse. He seeks in
his verse to do the very thing which he avoids doing in his prose:
follow a logical method. He seems to know too much what he is about, and
to be content with doing too little. His mystical poems, from the point
of view of such criticism as this, are all alike in that they all seek
to do the same thing. Nor does he always succeed. How does he sometimes
fail in verse to say what he conveys with such everlasting happiness in
prose!

"I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Caesar's hand and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakespeare's strain."

In these lines we have the same thought which appears a few pages later
in prose: "All that Shakespeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy
that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself." He has failed in
the verse because he has thrown a mystical gloss over a thought which
was stronger in its simplicity; because in the verse he states an
abstraction instead of giving an instance. The same failure follows him
sometimes in prose when he is too conscious of his machinery.

Emerson knew that the sense of mystery accompanies the shift of an
absorbed attention to some object which brings the mind back to the
present. "There are times when the cawing of a crow, a weed, a
snowflake, a boy's willow whistle, or a farmer planting in his field is
more suggestive to the mind than the Yosemite gorge or the Vatican would
be in another hour. In like mood, an old verse, or certain words, gleam
with rare significance." At the close of his essay on History he is
trying to make us feel that all history, in so far as we can know it, is
within ourselves, and is in a certain sense autobiography. He is
speaking of the Romans, and he suddenly pretends to see a lizard on the
wall, and proceeds to wonder what the lizard has to do with the Romans.
For this he has been quite properly laughed at by Dr. Holmes, because he
has resorted to an artifice and has failed to create an illusion.
I