EMERSON 171 



fervid, manly qualities and faith. His power of 

 statement is enormous; his scope of heing 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 Kome, 

 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. Eor 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 afiiliated 

 with all manner of persons, and quaffed the cup of 



