"
While we are enjoying his poetry, we feel its limitations. Having slight
ear for music, he often wrote halting lines. Sometimes his poetic flight is
marked by too sudden a descent, but we shall often find in his verse rare
jewels, such as:--
"When Duty whispers low, '_Thou must_,'
The youth replies, '_I can._'"
These lines seemed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, the moment he saw them, as if
they had been "carved on marble for a thousand years." Emerson's poetry
does not pulsate with warm human feeling, but it "follows the shining trail
of the ethereal," the ideal, and the eternal. His prose overshadows his
poetry, but no one without natural poetical ability of a high order could
have written the lines:--
"O tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire,"
or even have seen
"The frolic architecture of the snow."
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.--The central aim of Emerson's writing is moral
development. He is America's greatest ethical teacher. He thus voices his
fixed belief:--
"A breath of will blows eternally through the universe of
souls in the direction of the Right and Necessary."
This belief gives rise to his remarkable optimism for the future, to his
conviction that evil is but a stepping stone to good.
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