The mysticism and obscurity of some of his poems is faulty, and seems unnecessary, though great allowance should always be made for the peculiarity of the poet's mood, inspiration, and intention.

He is imperfect in rhythm and rhyme. Imperfect rhymes are sometimes found in the best poetry, and sometimes, though rarely, imperfect metre. But the poems of Emerson that approach completeness in the union of thought and form may almost be counted on the fingers. These are all admirable, some of them nearly perfect, which only makes us regret the deficiencies of the rest. The poet, when he once chooses rhythm and rhyme for the expression of his thought, is bound to see that the form of the expression is as perfect as the thought and feeling. For the poet must be the artist. Poetry must have a beautiful body as well as a beautiful soul. The poet deals not only with thoughts, feelings, and imaginations, but with language that may best embody them. He is free, of course, to choose his form of utterance, and may pour himself out quite unconfined by rhythm and rhyme. But, then, it is true that these are to writers of a delicately poetical nature natural and spontaneous moulds into which their poetry tends to run. And, if they elect this form, they should aim to make it worthy of its spiritual mate. It is a marriage, and should be as perfect a marriage as possible.

There are sometimes fits of quaint caprice, delicate but wilful whims of expression, in Mr. Emerson's prose sentences. But, in his verses, these are still more apparent. His lines seem sometimes bewitched, like dancing dervishes, as if tipsy with a nitrous oxide of fancy. Though their intention is genuine, they seem playing antics and attitudinizing, and make one smile where the theme is serious. While endeavoring to express a thought vividly and concisely, he adds an element of half-sportive wit, a mental quality not very distantly related to humor, and striking for audacity and surprise. In his prose, this often tends to make him brilliant and fresh. But there he has elbow-room for self-explanation and expansion, which he cannot find in

The result is an

the close quarters of rhymed verse. appearance of obscurity and oddity mingled with much that is expressive and beautiful. Add to this a harsh, halting, irregular metre, continually violating rule, and the ensemble is more quaint than pleasing or inspiring. In these respects, he sometimes sins beyond all absolution; and we often find his prose more poetical than his verse.

But, if he has written verses that are not poems, he has also written some of the best that have been done in this country. Besides the splendid lines, couplets, quatrains, and passages scattered through his verse, like well-cut and well-set diamonds in a pile of rough ones, there are entire poems of exceptional beauty, such as "Each and All," "The Problem," "Good-by, Proud World," "The Rhodora," "The Humblebee," "The Snow-storm," "Woodnotes," "Forerunners," "The Amulet," Amulet," "Threnody,"

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Rubies," "Days," "The Titmouse," "Nemesis," etc. Such poems as these make us forget his many failures, and are enough to rank him high, if not the highest, among American poets. But we sometimes ask if this title is not due as much to his prose as to his verse?

I have begun several times to write about Emerson, and each time, on reviewing what I had written, found it cold and inadequate. His books are so alive with suggestion that there seems to be always something omitted in whatever we say of him.

In summing up his characteristics, I run some risk of repetition, but important omission would be worse.

But

We are struck with his wide range of subjects. he enters upon all with the same sympathy and power. Little escapes his vision that can furnish symbol, relation, analogy. His sentinel-like intellect stands day and night on the alert, on its watch-tower, noting the heavens and the earth, the signs of the times and the eternal verities. I have said that he writes from within outward, but it is as true that only nature and human life are his stand-point. All truth is authenticated to him by a perception of reality.

If he inclines to mysticism, it is only because he has intimations of mysteries insoluble and beyond sense and the literal understanding.

He has no dealings with metaphysics. His mind seemed to shed Kant and Hegel as a duck sheds water. But he thought greatly of Goethe, for he harmonized the material and spiritual worlds. These two poles of the universe co-existed in perfect accord for Emerson. He valued the affirmations of Plato and the scepticism of Montaigne. He was drawn to books of travels, history, biography, natural science, as to the thinkers, poets, saints, and mystics. But he was fascinated by the least hint of correspondence between natural and spiritual. Whatever practical subject he touches, before he is done with it he glides into deeper relations underlying it. If it is politics, an ideal government is suggested; if it is manners, he sees always beneath it a substratum of character; if it is art, he has the key to its essential meaning and origin. The wildest sort of power in Southern, Western, or Irish communities, has its place and use, or at least its compensations. What he tried to express was the essence of things. He is never drawn out of his track by confusing side-lights, but moves directly toward the centre of his theme.

No one so harmonizes facts and ideas, and brings into view the underlying unity of Oriental and Occidental thought. His sublime optimism is not born of mood and temperament, but of broad intellectual insight. For he is aware of the great laws which govern mind as clearly as of those that govern matter; and there is no essential break or discord in the vast forces of the universe.

His self-sustainedness if such a word is allowable

was

a characteristic. Amid the various intellects and characters with which he came into contact, he was always unbiassed and original. He looks into his heart, and writes. Day by day, he records his most intimate thoughts, and weaves them into his public lectures. He trusts to memory as little as the artist with his pictures. I don't know any instance of his entire truth to himself, while absorbing from without all that

was related to him, more remarkable than his complete immersion in the theology of Swedenborg without losing his foothold and being swept away by the New Jerusalem Church. And the result was that no writer has given us such a fair and full estimate of the great Swedish seer as he has. This, of course, is not admitted by the disciples of the New Church, to whom Swedenborg's unique system of theology is absolutely without flaw.

It ought to be an encouraging sign that, whether he has many readers or few, Mr. Emerson's fame has grown immensely. I look back to the time when his little book "Nature" appeared. Where the American mind noticed it at all, it was as a strange and visionary production. But there were those who hailed it as a contribution to a new gospel. If I may be pardoned for mentioning the influence it had on the present writer, in common with several of his contemporaries, it was like a breath of morning and a vision of sunrise. It was profound, poetic, full of suggestion of larger and more beautiful horizons than the youth of that day were accustomed to have opened to them. (Carlyle's immortal Sartor Resartus was its only peer.) But those who shared the enthusiasm awakened by this, or that grand lyric poem the Divinity School Address, were comparatively few. And the extreme heterodoxy, hinted or expressed, was perhaps the head and front of their offending.

To-day, the intellect of America and of England entertains these "new views" as almost orthodox; while the beauty, the profoundness, and subtile force of the Emersonian ideas are indorsed by almost all right-minded readers. At any rate, the rare genius of this scholar, thinker, and poet, has not only maintained its stand among us, but has survived in spite of sectarians, literalists, and advocates of the "scientific method," until even these must admit it among their illustrations of the "Survival of the Fittest." Whether from the prevalence of this scientific method there are as many eager readers of Emerson now as in the days of the Transcendental Movement in New England, we cannot tell without statistics. But we can be sure that, if not, there

will be a reaction in the direction of his line of thought, which will give him an even more enduring fame than he has already acquired.

CHRISTOPHER P. CRANCH.

SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY.

*

A century and a half of destructive analysis had begun with Descartes and ended with Kant; and this had involved, as side-issues, those movements of radical criticism which we have seen in England, France, and Germany. The authority of Church and the authority of Creed had both been thoroughly undermined. To preserve the structure built upon them might still seem possible if, before it quite collapsed, a new foundation could be substituted for the old, by one of those ingenious processes known to our modern engineering: in short, a transubstantiation of the creed.

That structure - the visible fabric of Christian theology -includes two things: a system of belief, or speculative dogma; and a system of morals, or practical ethics. In real life, the two are found closely bound together; so that where belief was most completely shattered, as in France, the decay of morality was also most profound.† And, in proportion to its sincerity, men's belief has always been asserted to be inseparably bound up with the interests of general morality.

Still, in theory at least, the two are quite distinguishable; and, while they may be threatened by the same danger, they will defend themselves in very different ways. The speculative dogma will seek to fortify itself by some constructive system of philosophy; the practical ethics will seek to establish itself on a scientific base. In the era of reconstruction which follows the crisis of the Revolution, we shall therefore find, looking from the religious point of view,

See article on "Passage from Dogma to Philosophy," in this Review for October, 1882.

↑ That Germany was not at all events far behind, see Biedermann, Deutschland im achtzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. ii., p. 28.