it in his shirt-sleeves. As a counteractive to the impression produced by lapses, which are, after all, comparatively rare, let us quote a few sentences, worthy of Cicero or the Antonines, from the noble essay on Friendship

"Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can such a one is a friend. . . . He is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. . . . I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the company of ploughboys and tin-peddlars to a silken and perfumed amity. Let me be alone to the end of the world rather than that my friend should overstep by a word or a look his real sympathy. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. .. Better be

a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. . . . Should not the society of my friend be poetic, pure, universal and great as Nature itself?... Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him I want, but not news nor pottage. I can get politics and chat and neighbourly conveniences from cheaper companions. . . . Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the Universe it should rejoin its friend and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years. Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit to suck a sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God which many summers and many winters must ripen. . . . The only way to have a friend is to be one. . . . Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons. . . . It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy, or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods."

As an illustration of the author's earlier style and his power of idealising Nature, we have only space to refer to the often-quoted passage about beauty stealing in like air and enveloping the actions of Winkelreid and Columbus.

The freshness which breathes through Mr. Emerson's essays reappears in his poetry; but his verses are seldom so successful as his prose. Apart from the obscurity of their matter, which is great; for he has chosen rhythm as the vehicle of his remoter fantasies, they are defaced by frequent mannerisms,

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incongruities, and carelessness. Most of them are wanting in melody, many in syntax: the writer seems to trust to Providence for his rhymes, and changes his metres at will. Nevertheless, in both the volumes of his poetry there are poems. His genius has a lyric side, and the imaginative sympathy with nature and men like himself, which makes his prose poetical, prevents his verse, even when awkward, from becoming prosaic. The rippling of rivers, the sough of the pine, the murmur of the harvest, and the whir of insects, pervade and give life to his descriptions. A morning light is thrown over his happiest pages. He sings like Shelley of the stars and the earth: the delicate touches in some of his quieter reflective pictures are not unworthy of the author of the Excursion. All men occasionally become either dull or ridiculous: Mr. Emerson avoids the first; he is guilty of repetition, but seldom of diffuseness, and though sometimes verging on absurdity, he steers clear of platitude. These poems reveal him on another side generally concealed from us-that which has to do with home affections. Interleaved between the gold-dust drifts of Alexandrian and Persian mysticism, there are pieces that speak of a love that is neither "initial," "demoniac," nor "celestial," but human, and the consciousness of a common share in common joys and griefs. Of these the Dirge, In Memoriam, the Farewell, the lines to J. W., to Ellen, and the Threnody, are the most conspicuous. In the last the Idealist mourns over an irreparable loss, for which he finds but a partial consolation in his philosophy—

"The eager fate which carried thee
Took the largest part of me ;
For this losing is true dying,
This is lordly man's down-lying,
This his slow but sure reclining,
Star by star his world resigning.

"O child of paradise,

Boy who made dear his father's home,

In whose deep eyes

Men read the welfare of the times to come,

I am too much bereft :

The world dishonoured thou hast left.

O truth's and nature's costly lie!

O trusted broken prophecy !

O richest fortune sourly crossed!

Born for the future, to the future lost."

But the prevailing tone of the more intelligible part of these volumes is cheerful. The Woodnotes which, under this and other names, occupy so much of their space, are those of the lark rather than the nightingale.

"Thousand minstrels woke within me,
Our music's in the hills,"

is the perpetual refrain of the exulting worshipper of Nature. Camping among the Adirondacs, welcoming the May, or putting his garden into song, he keeps his new American faith

"When the forest shall mislead me,

When the night and morning lie,
When sea and land refuse to feed me,
"Twill be time enough to die:
Then will yet my mother yield
A pillow in her greenest field,
Nor the June flowers scorn to cover

The clay of her departed lover."

In the same strain—that of Quarles or Andrew Marvell at their best is his well known Good-bye, proud world, I'm going home; but the Puritanism of older days has here taken on another shape. To counterbalance this hermit-like spirit, there are other pieces relating to the intercourse of men with each other, showing a keen observation of practical life, and weighing its gains and losses-sound worldly wisdom in neat quatrains, and a few trumpet calls of liberty. The Hymn sung at the completion of the Concord monument is thoroughly

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patriotic, and at the same time strong and dignified; while the verses written immediately before and during the late war address the whole nation, in forcible terms both of warning and encouragement. Those practical manifestoes are the more striking from the fact that they are printed by the side of others proclaiming, in transcendental enigmas, the indifferentism of all transitory things, the fixity of Fate, and the doctrine of the absorption of the individual in the Infinite. Most readers of Mr. Emerson's earlier volume of verse have puzzled over The Sphinx. Let them endeavour to unravel the following lines from his May-Day, entitled Brahma :

Almost everything our author has written is excellent in parts, but he has produced no consummate whole we have in all his work spontaneity, sagacity, and vivacity, imperfectly harmonised with a love of abstraction.

The extracts we have given, within the limited compass of our review, sufficiently illustrate the fact that Mr. Emerson is singularly unequal as a Critic. For penetration, subtilty, and conclusiveness, some of his estimates of men and things

have never been surpassed. They are frequently most felicitous, at all times fresh and genuine, and expressed with a racy vigour, though, on some occasions, with an unpruned violence. On the other hand, this freshness is often purchased by a lack of knowledge. Hobbes confessed that he owed much of his originality to the restricted range of his reading. Emerson often owes his apparent force to the limitations of his thought. His eye is keen, but its range is comparatively narrow; and his deficiencies of vision are the more injurious that they generally escape his own observation. Unconsciously infected by the haste which he condemns in his countrymen, he looks at other nations through the folding telescope of a tourist. His English Traits abound in trenchant epigrams, but though they pay an amply generous tribute to English greatness, they miss-in many important particulars the salient points both for good and evil of English character. The following sentence is surely misleading, as well as slightly confused. "The religion of England is part of good breeding. When you see on the Continent the welldressed Englishman come into his ambassador's chapel, and put his face for silent prayer into his well-brushed hat, one cannot help feeling how much national pride prays with him and the religion of a gentleman." Mr. Emerson's taste is constantly at fault: an incessant straining after bon-mots mars his judgment as much as it vitiates his style; and his love of directness, pushed to an extreme, leads him over the confines of fact, as well as the reservations of fashion, into reckless caricature. A dogmatist, in spite of the impulsive inconsistencies which ought to be fatal to dogmatism, his judgments of those whose lives and writings do not square with his theories are for the most part valueless; and when he does injustice to his adversaries, his tacit assumption that all wise men must agree with him only adds to the offence. When, for instance, he asserts that "Locke is as surely the