ndeed, Dr. Holmes is somewhere so irreverent as to remark that a gill
of alcohol will bring on a psychical state very similar to that
suggested by Emerson; and Dr. Holmes is accurately happy in his jest,
because alcohol does dislocate the attention in a thoroughly mystical
manner.

There is throughout Emerson's poetry, as throughout all of the New
England poetry, too much thought, too much argument. Some of his verse
gives the reader a very curious and subtle impression that the lines are
a translation. This is because he is closely following a thesis. Indeed,
the lines are a translation. They were thought first, and poetry
afterwards. Read off his poetry, and you see through the scheme of it at
once. Read his prose, and you will be put to it to make out the
connection of ideas. The reason is that in the poetry the sequence is
intellectual, in the prose the sequence is emotional. It is no mere
epigram to say that his poetry is governed by the ordinary laws of prose
writing, and his prose by the laws of poetry.

The lines entitled Days have a dramatic vigor, a mystery, and a music
all their own:--

"Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn."

The prose version of these lines, which in this case is inferior, is to
be found in Works and Days: "He only is rich who owns the day.... They
come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant
friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts
they bring, they carry them as silently away."

That Emerson had within him the soul of a poet no one will question, but
his poems are expressed in prose forms. There are passages in his early
addresses which can be matched in English only by bits from Sir Thomas
Browne or Milton, or from the great poets. Heine might have written the
following parable into verse, but it could not have been finer. It comes
from the very bottom of Emerson's nature. It is his uttermost. Infancy
and manhood and old age, the first and the last of him, speak in it.

"Every