It is best
to suppose that he knew what he was about when he wandered into the
fairyland of verse, and that in such moments he found nothing better to
his hand. Yet if we are bidden to place him among the poets, it is
enough to open Keats at the _Ode to a Nightingale_, or Shelley at _The
Cloud_, the _Skylark_, or the _Sensitive Plant_, or Wordsworth at
_Tintern Abbey_, or Goethe at _Das Goettliche_, or Victor Hugo in the
_Contemplations_. Then in spite of occasional formality of rhythm and
artifice in ornament, we cannot choose but perceive how tuneful is their
music, how opulent the resources of their imagination, how various,
subtle, and penetrating their affinity for the fortunes and sympathies
of men, and next how modest a portion of all these rare and exquisite
qualifications reveals itself in the verse of Emerson.
III.
Few minds of the first order that have busied themselves in
contemplating the march of human fortunes, have marched forward in a
straight line of philosophic speculation unbroken to the end. Like
Burke, like Coleridge, like Wordsworth, at a given point they have a
return upon themselves. Having mastered the truths of one side, their
eyes open to what is true on the other; the work of revolution finished
or begun, they experience fatigue and reaction. In Hawthorne's romance,
after Miles Coverdale had passed his spring and summer among the
Utopians of Blithedale, he felt that the time had come when he must for
sheer sanity's sake go and hold a little talk with the Conservatives,
the merchants, the politicians, 'and all those respectable old
blockheads, who still in this intangibility and mistiness of affairs
kept a death-grip on one or two ideas which had not come into vogue
since yesterday morning.
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