American poetry presents the extraordinary anomaly of having no infancy. Like the portentous child in Hesiod, it was born with gray hairs. Decrepit from its birth, it had in itself no principle of vigorous life. By re-creation only could that life inspire it. The process had been commenced by Bryant, it was now to be completed. America was to have a poetry of her own.

On the 31st of August, 1837, Emerson delivered an Address at Cambridge which sounded a trumpet note. Thus rang the thrilling strain:

"Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that Poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years? . . . We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe. The spirit of the American is suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. Young men of the fairest promise who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in union with these. . . . We will walk on our own feet: we will work with our own hands: we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall no longer be a name for pity, for doubt and for sensual indulgence. A nation of men will, for the first time, exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."

Noble words; as Holmes justly says, "Nothing like them had been heard in the halls of Harvard since Samuel Adams supported the affirmative of the question, 'Whether it be lawful to resist the Chief Magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved."" It was, he says, the American intellectual Declaration of Independence.

The response to this appeal was so immediate and enthusiastic that it must have fallen on sympathies prepared to meet it more than half way. And that, indeed, was the case. A reaction had begun to set in: a stir was already in the air, Channing's similar but less eloquent appeal, delivered fourteen years before, had sunk into many minds. Everett's Orations and writings had struck, and very powerfully, a native note in prose, as Bryant and, in a minor degree, Whittier had done in poetry. If we glance at those who were to create the poetry of the next generation, and, where they had been already active, compare what they produced before 1837 with what they produced afterwards, we shall have some idea of what the movement, defining itself in that year, meant. Whittier and Longfellow were in their thirty-first year; the first had produced nothing of any value except Mogg Megone; the second, nothing at all but a few trifles contributed to magazines. Holmes, some two years younger, had given to the world a thin volume, which would have been forgotten long ago had it not been for his subsequent fame. Poe, an anomaly in everything, had produced some fine poems, but he was almost unknown. Lowell, in his nineteenth year, as yet guiltless of verse, was an undergraduate at Harvard. Whitman,

of the same age, and equally silent, was a wandering schoolmaster. Bayard Taylor was a child of thirteen, and Miller and Bret Harte were not born. The history of American poetry, till quite recently, centres round these names. With Emerson is associated the transcendental school; with Whittier, the purely native school. Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell are the centre of what may be called the academic and eclectic group; Poe stands alone; so, happily, does Whitman. Taylor represents the cosmopolitan school: Miller, the poetry of the Pacific slope: Lanier, the poetry of the South, and Bret Harte was the founder and representative of what Mr. Stedman calls the transcontinental school.

In some respects, Emerson is among the greatest of American poets; but it is not by virtue of his poetry, but by virtue of his prose and by virtue of what in his verse is independent of the form of verse. If we take Wordsworth's definition of a poet as exhaustive, namely, that he is "an inspired philosopher"; or if we estimate the quality of poetry by a criterion furnished us by Emerson himself, that it is to be judged by "the frame of mind which it induces," then there can be no question about Emerson's eminent place among poets. But these criteria are not sufficient. Poetry must have other qualities, even those indicated by Milton; it must be "simple, sensuous, impassioned." Simple, Emerson never is, except in touches. Where his poetry does not move in a world of symbolism, it moves in a world of riddles; and what it discerns it so encumbers with the laces and jewels of recondite fancies and phrases, that we dwell rather on the

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ornaments than on what they adorn. He seems to think and feel in aphorisms. Some of his poems resemble necklaces of crystals, and have all the hard, cold glitter of crystals. They abound in passages of which the following is typical:

The kingly bard

Must smite the chords rudely and hard,
As with a hammer or with mace;

That they may render back
Artful thunder, which conveys
Secrets of the solar track,

Sparks of the super-solar blaze.

He seems to have modelled his style on that of the poets of our Metaphysical School, particularly on that of Donne, of whom he has many reminiscences. His predominating characteristics as a poet are, if we may use the expression, intellectualized fancy and transcendental enthusiasm. But he had no attribute of the born singer. His verse, even where the themes are simple and natural, as in the touching Threnody and in May Day, has a constrained awkward movement, and, what is worse, leaves us with the impression that it has only been by the greatest labour that such an effect has been produced. We feel that what Milton said of himself in composing prose, namely, that he had only the use of his left hand, Emerson might have said of himself in composing verse. Occasionally, he can be most felicitous, as in

Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,

Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there

And the ripples in rhyme the oar forsake;

or in

Though love repine and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply;
'Tis man's perdition to be safe

When for the truth he ought to die;

or in the justly famous

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,

So near is God to man,

When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can.

But such felicities are so rare that they come upon us, as Matthew Arnold remarks, with a sort of surprise, just as the Concord Hymn in point of composition stands almost alone among his poems. He was not a born singer. The moment we place his Dirge, excellent as the first part of it is, beside Wordsworth's parallel Extemporary Stanzas on the Death of the Ettrick Shepherd, or the Fourth of July Ode and the Boston Hymn beside Whittier's lyrics in a similar strain, we see at once the difference between Emerson and those who, in Juvenal's phrase, have "bitten the laurel." His ear, moreover, is so defective that, the moment he leaves the simplest measures, or attempts any variations on them, his verses become intolerably dissonant. Nothing could be more unmusical than his blank

verse.

But his poetry is absolutely original; and, if we seek in it what we find in his prose, it is interesting and precious. There is enough thought in it, illumining and inspiringly suggestive thought, to set up a dozen poets. An intense lover of Nature, natural description is a very prominent element in