his mind, Beauty pitches her tents around its borders, and Wonder looks up toward it with wrapt eye, and Song tunes sweet melodies in its praise, and Love, like the arms of a child seeking to span a giant oak, seeks to draw into her embrace its immeasurable vastness. It is such a creed as a man might form and subscribe in a dream, and when he awoke receive a gentle shrift from wise and gentle confessors. Why criticise or condemn the long nocturnal reverie of a poetic mind, seeking to impose its soft fantasy upon the solid and stupendous universe! We will pass it by in silence, simply retorting the smile with which he regards our sterner the cobweb around the limbs of the 'Sphynx,' and deeming that he has her fast. Vain the question, for is not the suggestion of such sweet thoughts saying enough, saying all that it was needed to say? It is the bird that speaks-our own soul alone can furnish the interpretation. So with many of the poems of Emerson. They mean absolutely nothingthey are mere nonsense-verses—except to those who have learned their cypher, and whose heart instinctively dances to their tune. It is often a wordless music-a wild wailing rhythm-a sound inexplicable but no more absurd or meaningless than the note of the flute or the thrill of the mountain bagpipe. Who would, or who, though willing, could translate into common, into all language, that train of thought and emo-ories, as we watch him weaving his network of tion, long as the life of the soul, and wide as the curve of the sphere, which one inarticulate melody can awaken in the mind? So some of Emerson's verses float us away, listening and lost, on their stream of sound, and of dim suggestive meaning. Led himself, as he repeatedly says, "as far as the incommunicable," he leads us into the same mystic region, and we feel, that even in Nature there are things unutterable, which it is not possible for the tongue of man to utter, and which yet are real as the earth and the heavens. Coleridge remarks, that wherever you find a sentence musically worded, of true rhythm, and melody in the words, there is something deep and good in the meaning too. Mere no-meaning will not wed with sweet sound. We do not profess to be in the secret of some of the more mystic poems in this volume, such as 'Uriel' and the 'Sphynx.' Nor can we think that there is much room behind the mystic screen-where the poet stands-between his song and the Oversoul;' but we are ready to apply the old Socratic rule in his behalf-what we understand is excellent, what we do not understand is likely to be excellent too. This, indeed, is the great fault of Emerson. He has a penchant for framing brain-webs of all sorts and sizes; and because they hang beautifully in the sunbeam, and wave gracefully in the breeze, and are to his eye peopled with a fairy race, he deems them worthy of all acceptation, and we verily believe would mount the scaffold, if requisite, for the wildest day-dream that ever crossed his soul among the woods. It was for visions as palpable as the sun that the ancient prophets sacrificed or perilled their lives. It was for facts of which their own eyes and ears were cognizant that the apostles of the Lamb loved not their lives unto the death. It was not till this age that Cloudland,' nay, dreamland — dimmer still-have, sent forth their missionary to testify, with wrapt look, and face inflamed, and surging eloquence, his belief in the shadows of his own thoughts. Emerson, coming down among men from his mystic altitudes, reminds us irresistibly at times of Rip Van Winkle, with his gray beard and rusty firelock, descending the Catskill moun sleepy atmosphere hangs around him. All things have an unreal appearance. Men seem like trees walking. Of his own identity, he is by no means certain. As in the Taming of the Shrew,' the sun and the moon seem to have interchanged places; and yet, arrived at his native village, he (not exactly like honest Rip) sets up a grocer's shop, and sells, not the mystic draught of the mountain, but often the merest commonplace preparations of an antiquated morality. A man is often better than his theory, how-tains, from his sleep of a hundred years. A dim, ever good and comparatively true that theory be; and this holds especially true of a poet's creed, which, however dry, hard, and abstract, flushes into beauty at his touch, even as the poet's cottage has charms about it, which are concealed from the vulgar eye; and the poet's bride is often by him prodigally clothed with beauties which niggard nature had denied her. What Mr. Emerson's creed is, we honestly say we do not know that all we can confidently assert concerning it is, that you cannot gather it like apples into baskets, nor grind it like corn into provender, nor wind and unwind it like a hank of yarn, nor even collect it like sunlight into a focus, and analyse it into prismatic points, whether five or seven-nor inclose it within all the vocabularies of all vernacular tongues; and yet that it is not so bad or unholy, but that in In fact, nothing is more astounding about this writer than the mingled originality and triteness of his matter. Now he speaks as if from inmost communion with the soul of being; Nature seems relieved of a deep burden which had long lain on her bosom, when some of his oracular words are uttered; and now it is as if the throat of the thunder had announced the rule of three as if the old silence had been broken, to enunciate | lieving that the creation is a vast symbol of man ; that every tree and blade of grass is somehow cognate with his nature, and significant of his destiny; and that the remotest stars are only the distant perspective of that picture of which he is the central figure. It is this which so beautifies nature to his eye - that gives him more than an organic or associated pleasure in its forms-and renders it to him, not so much an object of love or of admiration, as of ardent study. To many, nature is but the face of a great doll—a well-painted insipidity; to Emerson, it has sculptured on it an unknown but mighty language, which he hopes yet to decipher. Could he but understand its alphabet! — could he but accurately spell out one of its glorious syllables! In the light of that flashing syllable, he would appear to himself discovered, explained; and thus, once for all, would be read the riddle of the world! some truism which every schoolboy had long ago recorded in his copy-book. The Essay on Compensation,' for example, proves most triumphantly that vice is its own punishment, and virtue its own reward; but, so far as it seeks to show that vice is its own only punishment, and virtue its own only reward, it signally fails. The truth, indeed, is this-vice does punish, and terribly punish, its victims, but who is to punish vice? How is it to be gibbetted for the warning of the moral universe? Can a mere under-current of present punishment be sufficient for this, if there be such a thing as a great general commonwealth in the universe at all? Must it not receive, as the voluntary act of responsible agents, some public and final rebuke? The compensation which it at present obtains is but comparatively a course of private teaching; and does not the fact, that it is on the whole unsuccessful, create a necessity for a more public, This, too, prevents his intercourse with nature strict, and effectual reckoning and instruction? from becoming either tedious or melancholy. Thus, what is true in this celebrated essay, is Nature, to most, is a gloomy companion. Somenot new; and what is new, is not true. This is times they are tired of it - more frequently they not unfrequently the manner of Mr. Emerson. are terrified. "What does all this mean? what To an egregious truism he sometimes suddenly would all this teach us? what would those frownappends a paradox as egregious. Like a stoliding schoolmasters of mountains have us to do, or or a sly servant at the door of a drawing-room, he calls out the names of an old respected guest, and of an intruding and presumptuous charlatan, so quickly and so close together, that they appear to the company to enter as a friendly pair. Of intentional deception on such matters, we cheerfully and at once acquit him; but to his eye, emerging from the strange, dreamy, abnormal regions in which he has dwelt so long, old things appear new, and things new to very crudity appear stamped with the authority, and covered with the hoary grandeur of age. Emerson's object of worship has been by many called nature-it is, in reality, man; but by man, in his dark ambiguities and inconsistencies, repelled, he has turned round and sought to see his face exhibited in the reflector of nature. It is man whom he seeks everywhere in the creation. In pursuit of an ideal of man, he runs up the midnight winds of the forest and questions every star of the sky. To gain some authentic tidings of man's origin― his nature-past and future history-he listens with patient ear to the songs of birds-the wail of torrents- as if each smallest surge of air were whispering, could he but catch the meaning, about man. He feels that every enigma runs into the great enigma-what is man? and that if he could but unlock his own heart, the key of the universe were found. Perhaps nature, in some benignant or unguarded hour, will tell him where that key was lost! At all events, he will persist in be learn?" are questions which, though not presented in form, are felt in reality, and which clear, as by a whip of small cords, the desecrated temple of nature. A few, indeed, are still left standing in the midst, alone! And among those few is Emerson, who is reconciled to remain, chiefly through the hope and the desire of attaining one day more perfect knowledge of nature's silent cypher, and more entire communion with nature's secret soul. Like an enthusiastic boy clasping a Homer's Iliad, and saying, "I shall yet be able to understand this," does he seem to say, "Dear are ye to me, Monadnoc and Agiochook, dear ye Alleghanies and Niagaras, because I yet hope (or at least those may hope who are to follow me) to unfix your clasps of iron-to unrol your sheets of adamant -to deliver the giant truths that are buried and struggling below you to arrest in human speech the accents of your vague and tumultuous thunder." As it is, his converse with creation is intimate and endearing. "Passing over a bare common, amid snow puddles, he almost fears to say how glad he is." He seems (particularly in his 'Woodnotes') an inspired tree, his veins full of sap instead of blood; and you take up his volume of poems, clad as it is in green, and smell to it as to a fresh leaf. He is like the shepherd (in Johnson's fine fable) among the Carpathian rocks, who understood the language of the vultures; the sounds - how manifold — of the American forest say to his purged ear what they | starveling jest, or a wretched pun, jerk them say to few others, and what even his language is unable fully to express. Akin to this passionate love of nature is one main error in Emerson's system. Because nature consoles and satisfies him, he would preach it as a healing influence of universal efficacy. He would send man to the fields and woods to learn instruction and get cured of his many wounds. These are the airy academies which he recommends. But alas! how few can act upon the recommendation! How few entertain a genuine love for nature! Man, through his unhappy wanderings, has been separated, nay, divorced, from what was originally his pure and beautiful bride-the universe. No one feels this more than Emerson, or has mourned it in language more plaintive. But why will he persist in prescribing nature as a panacea to those who, by his own showing, are incapable of apprehending its virtue? They are clamoring for bread, and he would give them rocks and ruins. We hold that between man and nature there is a gulf, which nothing but a vital change upon his character, circumstances, and habits can fill up. Ere applying the medicine you must surely premise the mouth. Man, as a collective being, has little perception of the beauty, and none of the high spiritual meaning of creation. And as well teach the blind religion through the avenue of the eye as teach average man truth or hope, or faith or purity, through a nature, amid which he dwells an alien and an enemy. On no subject is there so much pretended, and on none so little real feeling, as in reference to the beauties of nature. We do not allude merely to the trash which professed authors, like even Dickens, indite, when, against the grain, it is their cue to fall into raptures with Niagara, or the scenery of the Eternal City, but to the experiences of every-day life. How often have we travelled with parties of pleasure (as they are called) whose faces, after the first burst of animal excitement, produced by fresh air and society, had subsided, it was impossible to contemplate without a mixture of ludicrous and melancholy emotions. Besides, here and there, a young gentleman, with elevated eyebrow, and conceited sidelook, spouting poetry; and a few young ladies looking intensely sentimental during the spoutation; the majority exhibited, so far as pleasure was concerned, an absolute blankweariness, disgust, insipid disregard, or positive aversion, to all the grander features of the scenery, were the general feelings visible. Still more detestable were their occasional exclamations of forced admiration, nearly as eloquent, but not so sincere, as the enthusiasm of porkers over their provender. And how quickly did a down from their altitudes to a more congenial region! A double entendre told better than the sight of a biforked Grampian. The poppling of a cork was finer music than the roar of a cataract. A silly flirtation among the hazel-bushes was far more memorable than the sudden gleam of a blue lake flashing through the umbrage like another morning. And when the day was over, and the party were returning homewards, it was dismal, amid the deepening shadows of earth and the thickening glories of the sky, to witness the jaded looks, the exhausted spirits, the emptied hearts and souls of those vain flutterers about nature, whom the mighty mother had amused herself with tiring and tormenting, instead of unbaring to them her naked loveliness, or hinting to them one of the smallest secrets of her inmost soul. Specimens these of myriads upon myriads of parties of pleasure, which fashion is yearly stranding upon the shores of nature— to them an inhospitable coast-and proofs, that man, as a species, must grow, and perhaps grow for ages, ere he be fit, even "on tiptoe standing," to be on a level with that "house not made with hands," of which he is now the unworthy tenant. Surely the beauties of nature are an appliance too refined for the present coarse complaints of degraded humanity, which a fiercer caustic must cure. Emerson may be denominated emphatically the man of contrasts. At times he is, we have seen, the most commonplace, at other times the most paradoxical of thinkers. So is he at once one of the clearest and one of the most obscure of writers. He is seldom muddy; but either transparent as crystal or utterly opaque. He sprinkles sentences (as divines do scripture quotations) upon his page, which are not only clear, but cast, like glow-worms, a far and fairy light around them. At other times he scatters a shower of paragraphs, which lie, like elf-knots, insulated and insoluble. Hence reading him has the stimulus of a walk amid the interchanging lights and shadows of the woods, or it is like a game of hide-and-seek, somewhat like the unlearned reader of Howe and Baxter when he comes upon their Latin and Greek quotations. You skip or bolt his bits of mysticism, and pass on with greater gusto to the clear and the open. Whether there be degrees in biblical inspiration or not, there are degrees in his. Now he rays out light, and now, like a black star, he deluges us with darkness. The explanation of all this lies, we think, here-Emerson has naturally a poetic and practical, not a philosophic or subtle mind; he has subjected himself, however, to philosophic culture, with much care, but with partial success; when he speaks directly from his own mind, his utterances are vivid to very | which is wonderful, and in a style which— linbrilliance; when he speaks from recollection of gering, pausing, rushing, sleeping, or sounding his teachers, they are exceedingly perplexed on-can be likened to nothing save a river or and obscure. a breeze. But in two points we deem Emerson superior to Longfellow-in originality, and in nationality-two points which, indeed, run into one. Longfellow is rather a German than an American. He is Jean Paul, with the madcap and the creative elements omitted. His fancy is richer than his imagination is powerful. Emerson, on the contrary, has grafted his Germanism upon a strong, gnarled trunk, of aboriginal power, and his mind is often intuitive into principles, as well as fermenting with golden imagery. He is certainly, apart altogether from his verse, the truest poet America has produced. He has looked immediately, and through no foreign medium, at the poetical elements which he found lying around him. He has" staid at home with the soul," leaving others to gad abroad in search of an artificial and imperfect inspiration. He has said, "if the spirit of poetry chooses to descend upon me as I stand still, it is well; if not, I will not go a step out of my road in search of it; here, on this rugged soil of Massachusetts, When we take into account this author's poI take my stand, baring my brow in the breeze etic tendencies and idealistic training, we are of my own country, and invoking the genius of astonished that he should be often the most pracmy own woods." Nor has he invoked it in vain.tical of moralists. And yet so it is. His refined Words, which are pictures—sounds, which are theories frequently bend down like rainbows, and song-snatches of a deep woodland melody rest their bases on earth. He often seeks to jubilant raptures in praise of nature, reminding you afar off of those old Hebrew hymns which, paired to the timbrel or the clash of cymbals, rose like the cries of some great victory to heaven- are given to Emerson at his pleasure. His prose is not upon occasion, and elaborately dyed with poetic hues, but wears them ever about it on its way, which is a winged way, not along the earth, but through the high and liquid air. Why should a man like this write verse? Does he think that truth, like sheep, requires a bell round its neck, ere it be permitted to go abroad? Have his thoughts risen irresistibly above the reaches of prose, and voluntarily moved into harmonious numbers? Does he mean to abandon — or could he without remorse that wondrous prose style of his, combining the sweet simplicity of Addison with the force of Carlyle? Is he impatient to have his verses set to music, and sung in the streets or in the drawing-rooms? Let him be assured that, exquisite as many of his poems are, his other writings are a truer and richer voice, their short and mellow sentences moving to the breath of his spirit as musically as the pinecones to the breeze. In calling him the truest poet of America, we are not forgetful of the claims of Longfellow. His Excelsior' goes up, like one of those gods who left the earth when man fell-with such mournful dignity and lingering step does the hero and does the poem ascend. Poor Nathaniel Rogers, of Lynn-that brave, gifted spirit, of whom America was not worthy-died singing 'Excelsior' to his children. 'Hyperion,' again, is a prose poem (such as, longo intervallo, we hope ourselves one day to execute), containing the history of the progress of an ardent soul, moving, "Hyperion-like, on high." It is written with infinite grace and beauty, a play of fancy translate transcendental truth into life and action. Himself may be standing still, but it is as a cannon stands still; his words are careering over the world, calling on men to be fervent in spirit, as well as diligent in business. There is something at times almost laughable in the sight of this man living "collaterally or aside ❞— this quiet, wrapt mystic standing with folded arms, like a second Simon Stylites, and yet preaching motion, progress fervent motion, perpetual, kindling progress to all around him. Motionless as a finger-post, he, like it, shows the way onwards to all passers-by. He is, in this respect, very unlike Wordsworth, who would protect the quiet of his fields as carefully as that of his fam ily vault, or as the peace of his own heart; who, in love for calm, would almost prefer pacing the silent streets of a city of the plague to the most crowded thoroughfares of London, and who hates each railway, as if, to use the scripture allusion, its foundation were laid on his first-born, and its terminus were set up over the grave of his youngest child. Emerson, standing on the shore, blesses the steamers that are sweeping past, and cries, Sweep on to your destination with your freightage of busy thoughts and throbbing purposes, and, as you pass, churn up the waters into poetry;" perched on Monadnoc, he seems to point a path into the cloudland of the future for the rushing railway train, which af fects him not with fear, but with hope, for he looks on the machinery of this age as a great scheme of conductors, lying spread and ready for the nobler influences of a coming period. He feels that the real truth is this: railways have not desecrated Nature, but have left man behind, and it were well that man's spiritual should overtake his physical progress. The great lessons of a practical kind which rills," or up the long dim vistas of the forest glades. A healthier and happier Cowper, his retreat made, at the time, as little noise as that of the solitary of Olney. Huge, howling London knew not that one, soon to be the greatest poet of that age, and the most powerful satirist of its own vices, was leaving for the country, in the shape of a poor, timid hypochondriac. None cried "stole away" to this wounded hare. So Boston nor New England imagined that their finest spirit had forsaken his chapel for the cathedral of the woods—and they would have laughed you to scorn had you told them so. Emerson teaches, or tries to teach his country- | blackberry vines, or by the "leopard-colored men, are faith, hope, charity, and self-reliance. He does not need to teach them the cheap virtues of industry and attention to their own interest; certain distinctions between meum and tuum, right and wrong, even he has failed to impress upon their apprehension. But he has been unwearied in urging them to faith-in other words, to realize, above the details of life, its intrinsic worth and grandeur as a whole, as well as the presence of divine laws, controlling and animating it all; to hope in the existence of an advance as certain as the motion of the globe (a feeling this which we notice with pleasure to be growing in his writings); to love, as the mother of that milder day which he expects and prophesies; and to self-reliance, as the strong girdle of a nation's, as well as of an individual's loins, without which both are "weak as is a breaking wave.” To a country like America, whose dependence upon Britain too often reminds us of an upstart hanging heavily, yet with an air of insolent carelessness, upon the arm of a superior, of what use might the latter lesson be? "Trust thyself. Cut a strong oaken staff from thine own woods, and rest sturdily, like a woodland giant, upon it. Give over stealing from and then abusing the old country. Kill and eat thine own mutton, instead of living on rotten imported fricassées. Aspire to originality in something else than national faults, insolences, and brutalities. Dare to be true, honest, — thyself, indeed a new country- and the Great Spirit, who loved thee in thy shaggy primeval mantle, will love thee still, and breathe on thee a breath of his old inspiration." Thus, substantially, in a thousand places, does Emerson preach to his native country. In judging, whether of his faults or merits, we ought never to lose sight of what is his real position - he was, and shall soon return to be — a recluse. He has voluntarily retired from society. Like the knights of old, who left the society of their mistresses to meditate in solitary places upon their charms, he in love to man, has left him, and muses alone upon his character and destiny. His is not the savage grumbling retreat of a Black Dwarf, nor the Parthian flight of a Byron, nor the forced expulsion of a Shelley, who, seeking to clasp all men to his warm bosom, was with loud outcries repelled, and ran, shrieking, into solitude-it has been a quiet, deliberate, dignified withdrawal. He has said, "If I leave you, I shall, perchance, be better able to continue to love you — and perhaps, too, better able to understand you-and perhaps, above all, better able to profit you." And so the refined philanthropist has gone away to chew the cud of sweet and bitter fancy, among the In this capacity of recluse he has conducted himself in a way worthy of the voice which came to him from the heart of the forest, saying, "Come hither, and I will show thee a thing." By exercise and stern study he has conquered that tendency to aimless and indolent reverie, which is so apt to assail thinking men in solitude. By the practice of bodily temperance and mental hope, he has, in a great measure, evaded the gloom of vexing thoughts and importunate cravings. His mind has, "like a melon,” expanded in the sunshine. own "The outward forms of sky and earth, Have come to him in solitude." There is another subject where, we humbly think, his views are still more egregiously in error. We refer to hunan guilt. We agree with him in thinking that there is a point of view from which this dark topic may be a theme |