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 throbhing 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 seolian 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. 

 William Eossetti 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, 



