The Last Harvest | Page 6

I followed the fine
humble bee with rhymes and fancies free."
Now and then we come upon the germ of other poems in his prose.
Here is a hint of "Each and All" in a page written at the age of
thirty-one: "The shepherd or the beggar in his red cloak little knows
what a charm he gives to the wide landscape that charms you on the
mountain-top and whereof he makes the most agreeable feature, and I
no more the part my individuality plays in the All." The poem, his
reader will remember, begins in this wise:
"Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown Of thee from the
hilltop looking down."
In a prose sentence written in 1835 he says: "Nothing is beautiful alone.
Nothing but is beautiful in the whole." In the poem above referred to
this becomes:
"All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone."
In 1856 we find the first stanza of his 'beautiful "Two Rivers," written
in prose form: "Thy voice is sweet, Musketaquid; repeats the music of
the rain; but sweeter rivers silent flit through thee as those through
Concord plain." The substance of the next four stanzas is in prose form
also: "Thou art shut in thy banks; but the stream I love, flows in thy
water, and flows through rocks and through the air, and through
darkness, and through men, and women. I hear and see the inundation
and eternal spending of the stream, in winter and in summer, in men
and animals, in passion and thought. Happy are they who can hear it";
and so on. In the poem these sentences become:
"Thou in thy narrow banks are pent: The stream I love unbounded goes
Through flood and sea and firmament; Through light, through life, it
forward flows.

"I see the inundation sweet, I hear the spending of the stream Through
years, through men, through Nature fleet, Through love and thought,
through power and dream."
It is evident that Emerson was a severe critic of his own work. He knew
when he had struck fire, and he knew when he had failed. He was as
exacting with himself as with others. His conception of the character
and function of the poet was so high that he found the greatest poets
wanting. The poet is one of his three or four ever-recurring themes. He
is the divine man. He is bard and prophet, seer and savior. He is the
acme of human attainment. Verse devoid of insight into the method of
nature, and devoid of religious emotion, was to him but as sounding
brass and tinkling cymbal. He called Poe "the jingle man" because he
was a mere conjurer with words. The intellectual content of Poe's
works was negligible. He was a wizard with words and measures, but a
pauper in ideas. He did not add to our knowledge, he did not add to our
love of anything in nature or in life, he did not contribute to our
contentment in the world--the bread of life was not in him. What was in
him was mastery over the architectonics of verse. Emerson saw little in
Shelley for the same reason, but much in Herbert and Donne. Religion,
in his sense of the term,--the deep sea into which the streams of all
human thought empty,--was his final test of any man. Unless there was
something fundamental about him, something that savored of the
primordial deep of the universal spirit, he remained unmoved. The
elemental azure of the great bodies of water is suggestive of the tone
and hue Emerson demanded in great poetry. He found but little of it in
the men of his time: practically none in the contemporary poets of New
England. It was probably something of this pristine quality that arrested
Emerson's attention in Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." He saw in it
"the Appalachian enlargement of outline and treatment for service to
American literature."
Emerson said of himself: "I am a natural reader, and only a writer in the
absence of natural writers. In a true time I should never have written."
We must set this statement down to one of those fits of dissatisfaction
with himself, those negative moods that often came upon him. What he
meant by a true time is very obscure. In an earlier age he would

doubtless have remained a preacher, like his father and grandfather, but
coming under the influence of Goethe, Carlyle, and Wordsworth, and
other liberating influences of the nineteenth century, he was bound to
be a writer. When he was but twenty-one he speaks of his immoderate
fondness for writing. Writing was the passion of his life, his supreme
joy, and he went through the world with the writer's eye and ear and
hand always on duty.