He is moral first and last, and it is through his
impassioned and poetic treatment of the moral law that he gains
such an ascendency over his reader. He says, as for other things he
makes poetry of them, but the moral law makes poetry of him. He
sees in the world only the ethical, but he sees it through the
aesthetic faculty. Hence his page has the double charm of the
beautiful and the good.
II
One of the penalties Emerson pays for his sharp decision, his
mental pertinence and resistance, is the curtailment of his field
of vision and enjoyment. He is one of those men whom the gods drive
with blinders on, so that they see fiercely in only a few
directions. Supreme lover as he is of poetry,--Herrick's poetry,--
yet from the whole domain of what may be called emotional poetry,
the poetry of fluid humanity, tallied by music, he seems to be shut
out. This may be seen by his reference to Shelley in his last book,
"Letters and Social Aims," and by his preference of the
metaphysical poet throughout his writings. Wordsworth's famous
"Ode" is, he says, the high-water mark of English literature. What
he seems to value most in Shakespeare is the marvelous wit, the
pregnant sayings. He finds no poet in France, and in his "English
Traits" credits Tennyson with little but melody and color. (In our
last readings, do we not surely come to feel the manly and robust
fibre beneath Tennyson's silken vestments?) He demands of poetry
that it be a kind of spiritual manna, and is at last forced to
confess that there are no poets, and that when such angels do
appear, Homer and Milton will be tin pans.
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