EMERSON 171 
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, 
etc., seems to many to have even been explicitly an- 
swered 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 envel- 
oped. 
But Emerson has his difficulties with all the 
poets. Homer is too literal, Milton too literary, and 
there is too much of the whooping savage in Whit- 
man. He seems to think the real poet is yet to 
appear; a poet on new terms, the reconciler, the 
poet-priest, — one who shall unite the whiteness and 
purity of the saint with the power and unction of 
the sinner; one who shall bridge the chasm between 
Shakespeare and St. John. For when our Emerson 
gets on his highest horse, which he does only on 
two or three occasions, he finds Shakespeare only a 
half man, and that it would take Plato and Menu 
and Moses and Jesus to complete him. Shake- 
speare, he says, rested with the symbol, with the 
festal beauty of the world, and did not take the final 
step, and explore the essence of things, and ask, 
“Whence? What and Whither?” He was not 
wise for himself; he did not lead a beautiful, saintly 
life, but ate, and drank, and reveled, and affiliated 
with all manner of persons, and quaffed the cup of 
