MR. EMERSON'S POEMS.* Mn. EMERSON fails as a poet. This

book is very interesting reading considered as Mr. Emerson's philosophy chaunted with an emphasis that gives it a vitality it would not otherwise have, but the full depth and warmth of life, the "lyrical cry," as Mr. Arnold calls it, is never here. It is at best intellectual conviction spread downwards till it touches the

surface of feeling,—generally not so much as that,—intel- lectual conviction joined with a certain insight into beauty, and

nothing more. What appears to us to persuade Mr. Emerson that he is a poet, is a certain fanatical belief in Nature which is more than even his pantheistical philosophy can fully justify. He has a true eye for external Nature, and a fanatical feeling about

the wisdom and virtue she gives. But fanaticism of conviction is not by any means always,—nor often,—poetical. On the con- trary, it may be safely laid down that only those emotions, however powerful, are poetical which, instead of pressing directly outwards,

tend to press inwards on the other elements of our life, to saturate

the whole character with their influence, and to borrow from these other elements of life all the harmony and analogy they are able to lend. Thus the- same eager belief in Nature which, in Mr.

Emerson, remains little but an intellectual fanaticism, has in other poets,—Wordsworth, for example,—sunk into the whole character, and borrowed life from the whole range of his character, till it has been transmuted into poetry. Where Wordsworth tells us of the

daffodils,— "For oft when on my conch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye That is the bliss of solitude, And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils,"

—you feel at once not only that the love of nature is blended with his whole being,—so it is, we have no doubt, with Mr. Emerson's, —but that the expression of that love enlists and harmonizes every faculty of his nature, so that the joy of freedom, and the delight of luminous thought, and the rapture of solitude, all flow at once into that glory of the eye and freshness of the senses, with which he is possessed as the breeze that blows upon his own cheek tosses the yellow daffodils and the lake's tiny waves. This is what we always want to feel in lyrical poetry, not only that it expresses keen and strong feeling, but feeling that enlists the whole cha- racter in its tones, feeling that has kindled the whole nature, and spread a light through it such as sunset spreads over the most leaden clouds and the coldest rocks. Now, this is what we never really feel with Mr. Emerson,—and even when we are half doubtfully beginning to feel it, the illusion vanishes in a moment.

The chief part of his nature stands outside his verse, watching, lynx-eyed, the failure of his philosophy to account fully for the strength of his own belief. You are never for a moment able to forget the keen transcendentalist toiling away at the impossible task of getting his philosophy to explain fully his delight in ex- ternal nature,—his preference of nature to man ;—for in his philo-

* May-Day, cad Other Pieces. By Ralph Waldo Emerson. London: Routledge. sopby nature's highest life is in man,- and yet man only half interests him. The critic, standing outside his own feeling, lurks behind every line, peeps out in almost every phrase. For instance, by far the most musical and least intellectually interrupted lines we have been able to find in this little volume are the following, in May Day, on the music of the 2Eolian harp:— " /Bohan harp,

How strangely wise thy strain!

Gay for youth, gay for youth.

(Sweet is art, but sweeter truth,)

In the hall at summer eve

Fate and Beauty skilled to weave.

From the eager opening strings Rung loud and bold the song. Who but loved the wind-harp's note ?

How should not the poet doat On its mystic tongue, With its primeval memory, Reporting what old minstrels said

Of Merlin locked the harp within,—

Merlin paying the pain of sin, Pent in a dungeon made of air — And some attain his voice to hear, Words of pain and cries of fear, But pillowed all on melody, As fits the griefs of bards to be.

And what if that all-echoing shell,

Which thus the buried Past can tell,

Should rive the Future, and reveal What his dread folds would fain conceal ?

It shares the secret of the earth, And of the kinds that owe her birth.

Speaks not of self that mystic tone, But of the Overgoda alone:

It trembles to the cosmic breath,—

As it heareth, so it saith ; Obeying meek the primal Cause, It is the tongue of mundane laws.

And this, at least, I dare affirm, Since genius too has bound and term, There is no bard in all the choir, Not Homer's self, the poet sire, Wise Milton's odes of pensive pleasure, Or Shakespeare, whom no mind can measure, Nor Collins' verse of tender pain, Nor Byron's clarion of disdain.

Scott, the delight of generous boys,

Or Wordsworth, Pan's recording voice,—

Not one of all can put in verse, Or to this presence could rehearse, The sights and voices ravishing The boy knew on the hills in Spring, When paoing through the oaks he heard Sharp queries of the sentry-bird, The heavy grouse's sudden whirr, The rattle of the kingfisher ; Saw bonfires of the harlot flies In the lowland, when day dies; Or marked, benighted, and forlorn, The first far signal-fire of morn.

These syllables that Nature spoke, And the thoughts that in him woke, Can adequately utter none Save to his ear the wind-harp lone.

And best can teach its Delphian chord How Nature to the soul is moored, If once again that silent string,

As erst it wont, would thrill and ring."

Some of that is musical and pleasant, especially the lines de- scribing

" The sights and voices ravishing

The boy knew on the hills in Spring,"

but in almost all the lines you see the intellectual struggle going on, the thinker bending his cold intellectual eye upon the emotion which the /Eolian harp gives him, and trying to believe that it has more of " cosmic breath " in it, though it only expresses the har- mony of physical laws, than those poets who, according to the Emersonian philosophy, are nothing but far higher steps in the organization of laws of the same kind and the same immutability. He feels that such poets do' not tell " how nature to the soul is moored," as he awkwardly phrases it, as well as natural sounds ; but there is a secret puzzle in him on this score which keeps the greater part of his nature outside the feeling he expresses. His real philosophy is given elsewhere in still colder verses. He has half forgotten and half remembers it here, when he praises the

.Eolian harp thus :—

"One musician is sure,

His wisdom will not fail; He has not tasted wine impure,

Or bent to passion frail. Age cannot cloud his memory, Nor grief nntune his voice, Ranging down the ruled scale, From tone of joy to inward wail, Tempering the pitch of all In his inward cave."

You can almost see, at all events, think you see, in the very hesitating sway of the rhythm that Mr. Emerson is discontented with his own poetical reasons for preferring the lEolian harp, and is questioning himself from outside himself, as he pours out drop by drop this temperate expression of his secretly.intemperate feeling. The warm emotion passing through the mould of a cold intellect is repelled, as it were, and kept at a distance by something analogous to a capillary repulsion, and the reader feels a separat- ing space between the intellectual mould and the feeling poured into it.

By far the greater part of the book has not even as much of a struggle, between feeling and intellect as this, but is pure intellectual opinion metrically—and not always very rhythmically —expressed. Take the following expression of his true theory about the share Nature has in man's highest works :- " NATURE.

She is gamesome and good, But of mutable mood,— No dreary repeater now and again, She will be all things to all men.

She who is old, but nowise feeble, Pours her power into the people, Merry and manifold without bar, Makes and moulds them what they are, And what they call their city way Is not their way, but hers, And what they say they made to-day, They learned of the oaks and firs.

She spawneth men as mallows fresh, Hero and maiden, flesh of her flesh ; She drugs her wator and her wheat With the flavours she finds meet, And gives them what to drink and eat ; And having thus their bread and growth, They do her bidding, nothing loath.

What's most theirs is not their own, Ent borrowed in atoms from iron and stone, And in their vaunted works of Art The master-stroko is still her part."

No one can call that poetry. It is a cold version of Mr. Emerson's old doctrine in Representative Men that " incarnate chlorine dis- covers chlorine."

It is very curious to learn that Mr. Emerson's semi-political odes have been sung in Boston and Concord by public meetings. Nothing less popular and more doctrinal was surely ever sung, even out of the old Presbyterian hymn-books. Take the fol- lowing, not exactly indeed in the spirit of Artemus Ward's saying that " the earth revolves upon its axis subject to the Con- stitution of the United States," but still embodying the same profound emotion of ever fresh wonder at that great achieve- ment :— " ODE SUNG IN THE TOWN WATT, CONCORD, JULY 4, 1857.

"0 tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire ;

One morn is in the mighty heaven, And one in our desire.

"The cannon boom from town to town, Our pulses are not less, The joy-bells chime their tidings down, Which children's voices bless.

" For He that flung the broad blue fold O'er-mantling land and sea, One third part of the sky unrolled For the banner of the free.

" The men are ripe of Saxon kind To build an equal State,—

To take the statute from the mind, And make of duty fate.

"United States ! the ages plead,—

Present and Past in under-song,- Go, put your creed into your deed, Nor speak with double tongue.

" For sea and land don't understand, Nor skies without a frown See rights for which the one hand fights By the other cloven down.

"Be just at home ; then write your scroll Of honour o'er the sea, And bid the broad Atlantic roll A ferry of the free.

"And, henceforth, there shall be no chain, Save underneath the sea,

The wires shall murmur through the main Sweet songs of LIBERTY.

"The conscious stars accord above, The waters wild below, And under, through the Cable wove, His fiery errands go.

44 For He that worketh high and wise, Nor pauses in His plan,

Will take the sun out of the skies Ere freedom out of man."

The only verse here of real life is the last. The "ferry of the free" is a new form of the " herring-pond" metaphor, and the wires murmuring liberty is mere " buncombe."

"To take the statute from the mind

And make of duty fate," is really fine, but it is less poetry than a sententious apophthegm of ethical wisdom.

On the whole, we do not doubt that this book will be read with pleasure as an expression of Mr. Emerson's remarkable character, at once grave and dreamy, playful and transcendental, shrewd and ecstatic, humorous and yet liable to the special Philistinism of Yankee provincialism, teeming with intellectual culture, and yet with a basis of distrust for intellectual culture at the bottom ; in a word, delicate in critical insight, and yet disposed to grasp almost as a duty at the grandiloquent and gigantesque fancies of what we may call the Prairie school of metaphor. But, as poetry, this volume will not be read long. It touches the confines of poetry here and there, but even then only just takes from it a faint and evanescent glow.