paradoxes.  Yet I believe his work has the seal of immortality upon it as much as that of any of them.  No doubt he has a meaning to us now and in this country that will be lost to succeeding time.  His religious significance will not be so important to the next generation.  He is being or has been so completely absorbed by his times, that readers and hearers hereafter will get him from a thousand sources, or his contribution will become the common property of the race.  All the masters probably had some peculiar import or tie to their contemporaries that we at a distance miss.  It is thought by scholars that we have lost the key, or one key, to Dante, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare,—­ the key or the insight that people living under the same roof get of each other.

But, aside from and over and above everything else, Emerson appeals to youth and to genius. If you have these, you will understand him and delight in him; if not, or neither of them, you will make little of him.  And I do not see why this should not be just as true any time hence as at present.

X THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE

TO WALT WHITMAN

“’I, thirty-six years old, in perfect health, begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.’”
CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

“They say that thou art sick, art growing old,
Thou Poet of unconquerable health,
With youth far-stretching, through the golden wealth
Of autumn, to Death’s frostful, friendly cold. 
The never-blenching eyes, that did behold
Life’s fair and foul, with measureless content,
And gaze ne’er sated, saddened as they bent
Over the dying soldier in the fold
Of thy large comrade love;—­then broke the tear! 
War-dream, field-vigil, the bequeathed kiss,
Have brought old age to thee; yet, Master, now,
Cease not thy song to us; lest we should miss
A death-chant of indomitable cheer,
Blown as a gale from God;—­oh sing it thou!”
ARRAN LEIGH (England).

I

Whoever has witnessed the flight of any of the great birds, as the eagle, the condor, the sea-gulls, the proud hawks, has perhaps felt that the poetic suggestion of the feathered tribes is not all confined to the sweet and tiny songsters,—­the thrushes, canaries, and mockingbirds of the groves and orchards, or of the gilded cage in my lady’s chamber.  It is by some such analogy that I would indicate the character of the poetry I am about to discuss, compared with that of the more popular and melodious singer,—­the poetry of the strong wing and the daring flight.

Well and profoundly has a Danish critic said, in “For Ide og Virkelighed” ("For the Idea and the Reality"), a Copenhagen magazine:—­