But who shall say
that he discovers that 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,' which
a great poet has made the fundamental element of poetry? There are too
few melodious progressions; the melting of the thought with natural
images and with human feeling is incomplete; we miss the charm of
perfect assimilation, fusion, and incorporation; and in the midst of all
the vigour and courage of his work, Emerson has almost forgotten that it
is part of the poet's business to give pleasure. It is true that
pleasure is sometimes undoubtedly to be had from verse that is not above
mediocrity, and Wordsworth once designed to write an essay examining why
bad poetry pleases. Poetry that pleases may be bad, but it is equally
true that no poetry which fails to please can be really good. Some one
says that gems of expression make Emerson's essays oracular and his
verse prophetic. But, to borrow Horace's well-known phrase, 'tis not
enough that poems should be sublime; _dulcia sunto_,--they must be
touching and sympathetic. Only a bold critic will say that this is a
mark of Emerson's poems. They are too naked, unrelated, and cosmic; too
little clad with the vesture of human associations. Light and shade do
not alternate in winning and rich relief, and as Carlyle found it, the
radiance is 'thin piercing,' leaving none of the sweet and dim recesses
so dear to the lover of nature. We may, however, well be content to
leave a man of Emerson's calibre to choose his own exercises.
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