172 BIRDS AND POETS 
life with gusto and relish. The elect, spotless souls 
will always look upon the heat and unconscious op- 
timism of the great poet with deep regret. But if 
man would not become emasculated, if human life 
is to continue, we must cherish the coarse as well as 
the fine, the root as well as the top and flower. The 
poet-priest in the Emersonian sense has never yet 
appeared, and what reason have we to expect him? 
The poet means life, the whole of life,—all your 
ethics and philosophies, and essences and reason of 
things, in vital play and fusion, clothed with form 
and color, and throbbing with passion: the priest 
means a part, a thought, a precept; he means sup- 
pression, expurgation, death. To have gone farther 
than Shakespeare would have been to cease to be a 
poet and become a mystic or seer. | 
Yet it would be absurd to say, as a leading British 
literary journal recently did, that Emerson is not a 
poet. He is one kind of a poet. He has written 
plenty of poems that are as melodious as the hum of 
a wild bee in the air,— chords of wild eolian music. 
Undoubtedly his is, on the whole, a bloodless 
kind of poetry. It suggests the pale gray matter 
of the cerebrum rather than flesh and blood. Mr. 
Wilham Rossetti has made a suggestive remark about 
him. He is not so essentially a poet, says this critic, 
as he is a Druid that wanders among the bards, and 
strikes the harp with even more than bardic stress. 
Not in the poetry of any of his contemporaries is 
there such a burden of the mystery of things, or such 
round wind-harp tones, lines so tense and resonant, 
