EMERSON 173 
and blown upon by a breeze from the highest heaven 
of thought. In certain respects he has gone beyond 
any other. He has gone beyond the symbol to the 
thing signified. He has emptied poetic forms of 
their meaning and made poetry of that. He would 
fain cut the world up into stars to shine in the 
intellectual firmament. He is more and he is less 
than the best. 
He stands among other poets like a pine-tree amid 
a forest of oak and maple. He seems to belong to 
another race, and to other climes and conditions. 
He is great in one direction, up; no dancing leaves, 
but rapt needles; never abandonment, never a toss- 
ing and careering, never an avalanche of emotion; 
the same in sun and snow, scattering his cones, and 
with night and obscurity amid his branches. He 
is moral first and last, and it is through his impas- 
sioned 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 esthetic 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 
