affiliated with all manner of persons, and quaffed the cup of life with gusto and relish.  The elect, spotless souls will always look upon the heat and unconscious optimism of the great poet with deep regret.  But if man would not become emasculated, if human life is to continue, we must cherish the coarse as well as the fine, the root as well as the top and flower.  The poet-priest in the Emersonian sense has never yet appeared, and what reason have we to expect him?  The poet means life, the whole of life,—­all your ethics and philosophies, and essences and reason of things, in vital play and fusion, clothed with form and color, and throbbing with passion:  the priest means a part, a thought, a precept; he means suppression, expurgation, death.  To have gone farther than Shakespeare would have been to cease to be a poet, and to become a mystic or a seer.

Yet it would be absurd to say, as a leading British literary journal recently did, that Emerson is not a poet.  He is one kind of a poet.  He has written plenty of poems that are as melodious as the hum of a wild bee in the air,—­chords of wild aeolian music.

Undoubtedly his is, on the whole, a bloodless kind of poetry.  It suggests the pale gray matter of the cerebrum rather than flesh and blood.  Mr. William Rossetti has made a suggestive remark about him.  He is not so essentially a poet, says this critic, as he is a Druid that wanders among the bards, and strikes the harp with even more than bardic stress.

Not in the poetry of any of his contemporaries is there such a burden of the mystery of things, nor are there such round wind-harp tones, nor lines so tense and resonant, and blown upon by a breeze from the highest heaven of thought.  In certain respects he has gone beyond any other.  He has gone beyond the symbol to the thing signified.  He has emptied poetic forms of their meaning and made poetry of that.  He would fain cut the world up into stars to shine in the intellectual firmament.  He is more and he is less than the best.

He stands among other poets like a pine-tree amid a forest of oak and maple.  He seems to belong to another race, and to other climes and conditions.  He is great in one direction, up; no dancing leaves, but rapt needles; never abandonment, never a tossing and careering, never an avalanche of emotion; the same in sun and snow, scattering his cones, and with night and obscurity amid his branches.  He is moral first and last, and it is through his impassioned and poetic treatment of the moral law that he gains such an ascendency over his reader.  He says, as for other things he makes poetry of them, but the moral law makes poetry of him.  He sees in the world only the ethical, but he sees it through the aesthetic faculty.  Hence his page has the double charm of the beautiful and the good.

II