Indeed, it is to be distinctly stated and emphasized, that
Emerson is essentially a priest, and that the key to all he has
said and written is to be found in the fact that his point of view
is not that of the acceptor, the creator,--Shakespeare's point of
view,--but that of the refiner and selector, the priest's point of
view. He described his own state rather than that of mankind when
he said, "The human mind stands ever in perplexity, demanding
intellect, demanding sanctity, impatient equally of each without
the other."
Much surprise has been expressed in literary circles in this
country that Emerson has not followed up his first off-hand
indorsement of Walt Whitman with fuller and more deliberate
approval of that poet, but has rather taken the opposite tack. But
the wonder is that he should have been carried off his feet at all
in the manner he was; and it must have been no ordinary breeze that
did it. Emerson shares with his contemporaries the vast
preponderance of the critical and discerning intellect over the
fervid, manly qualities and faith. His power of statement is
enormous; his scope of being is not enormous. The prayer he uttered
many years ago for a poet of the modern, one who could see in the
gigantic materialism of the times the carnival of the same deities
we so much admire in Greece and Rome, seems to many to have even
been explicitly answered in Whitman; but Emerson is balked by the
cloud of materials, the din and dust of action, and the moving
armies, in which the god comes enveloped.
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