The venerable and historic town of Concord (not Concord, New Hampshire, famous for its small-beer school of politicians) is likely, in addition to its Revolutionary renown as the spot where

to be famous hereafter as the residence of the essayist, poet, popular lecturer, and transcendental philosopher, Emerson, who, whatever may be thought of him by his contemporaries hereabouts, is certainly destined to a permanent and world-wide reputation,—to become a fixed star in that luminous cluster of original thinkers who from their high places exercise a steady and never-waning influence on the intellectual growth of mankind. Concord, Massachusetts, therefore, as the scene of one of the events which inaugurated the American Revolution, and as the home of one of the first intellectual men of the age, is in no particular danger, in the long run, of being eclipsed by its namesake in New Hampshire, though that be the capital of a small State and the home of a small President. However this may be, one thing is certain, that there are few places better adapted to study and the cultivation of letters. Through its meadows and shady intervale lands winds a slow stream, synonymous with the town itself, a stream like the English Ouse or Avon, or the smooth gliding Mincius of classic song, not rapid or turbulent, but with just such a clear and languid current as poets have loved to prose upon from time immemorial….

As a lecturer and prose essayist, Mr. Emerson is even popularly known, that is, to the mass of his countrymen; but as a poet he has found a smaller audience, though a fit one. His verses can never become popular. He cannot therefore cry out with Horace, "profanum vulgus et arceo, " for the mob of people that read with ease (to alter slightly Pope's lines for the sake of adapting it to the times) will never defile his poetry with their vulgar admiration. It will never fly through the mouths of men like Pope's pithy couplets, or Gray's "Elegy," or Longfellow's "Psalm of Life," but it has already secured for itself a select circle of admirers among the highly cultivated and intellectual, and such a circle it will always retain. It is even now frequently quoted by the ablest writers in the leading reviews and periodicals of England and this country. Indeed, we venture to assert that there are few writers of eminence, either in America or Great Britain, who are not perfectly familiar with the products of the Emersonian Muse, with the strange, weird, abstruse notes of the Emersonian lyre. Like the Theban poet Pindar, Emerson, when he wraps his singing robes about him, addresses himself only to the wise. He has many musical shafts in his quiver, but their music is only audible and intelligible "ôoî όοοοΐ. " His poems are as utterly devoid of anything like sentiment or passion as the versified apothegms of the old Greek philosophers and didactic bards. In fact, sentiment and passion, which are ordinarily supposed to be the very soul and essential principle of poetry, he utterly ignores. His best passages have "the sparkle of the spar," but none of the warmth of flesh and blood. They appeal not to the heart, but to pure intellect. He is not of the romantic school of poets. He is entirely free from "dark imaginings" of the Byronic stamp, and from maudlin, lovesick, moon-nursed fantasies. His Muse traffics not in these woes. She haunts "an intellectual bower." Some of his poetical pieces are pearl-like strings of glittering sententiœ, of brilliant and grand thoughts set in a most transparent and crystalline diction. Emerson's poetry, like his prose, is all permeated with emanations from one great central ideal. His peculiar philosophical system, call it by what name you choose, Spinozism, Pantheism, or Transcendentalism, is the master chord of his lyre, as it is the keynote of all his writings, whether in verse or prose. Around this central idea his poetry winds in luxuriant wreaths and festoons, like the leaves and flowers of some gorgeous parasite about a massy trunk. What Emerson's system of philosophy is exactly, it is no easy task to determine…. Whatever it is, Mr. Emerson seems to entertain the most sublime confidence in its entire correctness. He evidently looks upon it as the master-key which unlocks the secrets of the universe and the most hidden recesses and profoundest Domdaniel caverns of Nature. Beyond a doubt, Mr. Emerson has the highest qualifications for a poet. Even his prose itself has in passages the golden rythmus of the most exquisitely modulated versification. He is profoundly learned, not only in printed books, but also in the book of Nature. All the lore of the East and the West is his. He is as familiar with Hafiz and Firdusi, as he is with Homer and Shakespeare; with the sages and philosophers of India, China, Persia, and Arabia, as he is with those of Greece, Rome, Germany, England, and France. He is deeply versed in the lore of plants, stones, and stars. He has looked on Nature with a lover's eye, and pursued her through all her most intricate windings, and learned to interpret her most mysterious symbols. Mr. Emerson is happy in his choice of language, which in his hands is perfectly plastic and flexible. His words are culled and marshalled with the most exquisite taste. Many of his periods are rounded and enamelled to absolute perfection. It used to be fashionable to speak of Emerson as an imitator of the rough, craggy Carlyle. This idea was without doubt engendered by the fact that several of Carlyle's works were published in this country under the supervision of Emerson, and the editor was naturally confounded with his author. Emerson, in fact, is the very opposite of Carlyle both in style of thought and composition. They no more resemble each other as writers than would an Ithuriel and a Caliban in form and feature if matched together.

But there are great inequalities in Emerson's poetry. While he has passages, indeed whole pieces, which are as faultless, flawless, and beautiful as some costly gem, he has others which, to the understanding of the uninitiated reader at least, appear to be mere unmeaning strings of words, vague, hyper-metaphysical formulas, and pure balderdash. They are hard sayings, too hard indeed for the comprehension of any human being except a Dialist. In nearly all Mr. Emerson's poems, it is evident that more is meant than meets the ear and eye. He has an Oriental love of the allegoric and mystical. But above all its other merits his poetry is sui generis, original and his own. It is not the product of any second-hand inspiration, awakened by the works of this or that great poet beyond the water, as is the case with the bulk of American poetry. It is not this or that English or German bard diluted and sophisticated, but genuine, unadulterated Emerson, with an unmistakable smack of the soil of his fatherland about it; for if he has occasion to apostrophize a mountain or river in his verse, he gives a decided preference to Monadnock or the Alleghanies over Olympus and the Alps,—to the beautiful rivers of his native New England, with their wild Indian names, hitherto "unmarried to immortal verse," over the most vaunted streams of the Old World. This is as it should be. But for the most part it is with our poetry as with the wines which we use; both are mere imitations and not natural products, the latter generally consisting of ingenious chemical mixtures, whose rich vinous hue and bouquet and flavor were not imparted by the glowing sun and genial soil of Burgundy, Champagne, and the African Islands, but by artificial perfumes and dye-stuffs. But we have one American vintage, at least, which does not smell of the apothecary-shop, but of the American soil, of the banks of the Ohio. In like manner we have a few poets who do not derive their inspiration from Tennyson or Wordsworth or Browning, or any other European bard, living or dead, but directly from Nature herself. Mr. Emerson's published poems are all included within the limits of a single small volume; but that volume is infinitely suggestive, and contains matter enough, if wire-drawn and reduced, to fill many tomes. In it all the Emersonian prose essays are presented in brief, fused, intensified, and hardened, as it were, into crystals. Virgil himself could not originate a system of philosophy in more honeyed verse. With three or four exceptions, each poem is a chip from a different side of the same block, a variation of the same key-note, a new illustration of one master idea, for there is but one string to Emerson's lyre; but he draws from that solitary chord as many variations as ever did a Paganini. Four, at least, of his poems have become popular, and have been reprinted a thousand times in newspapers, reviews, and specimens of American verse. We allude to the pieces entitled "Good-Bye," "Rhodora," "The Humble-Bee," and "The Problem." These are pure ambrosia. The Good-Bye to the world is worthy of the age of Elizabeth, and might have been penned by a Wotton or Raleigh after they had "sounded all the depths and shoals of honor"; indeed, it reminds one of verses which those great statesmen and scholars actually did write after they had become satiated with the world. The lines to the "Humble-Bee," have been compared to the Allegro and Penseroso of Milton. It seems to breathe the very spirit of the delicious months of May and June. It might have been written upon a bank of violets, fanned by the sweet South, such as the impassioned Duke Orsino speaks of. It is enough in itself to give its author a permanent place in English literature. Anacreon has an ode, and Mr. Leigh Hunt has a sonnet, addressed to the grasshopper, both exquisite in their way, but neither comparable to Emerson's lines on the "yellow-breeched" American insect, the tiny and erratic

Sailor of the atmosphere;
Swimmer through the waves of air;
Voyager of light and noon;
Epicurean of June.

…. .

When the south wind, in May days,
With a net of shining haze
Silvers the horizon wall,
And, with softness touching all,
Tints the human countenance
With a color of romance,
And, infusing subtle heats,
Turns the sod to violets,
Thou in sunny solitudes,
Rover of the underwoods,
The green silence dost displace,
With thy mellow, breezy bass.

Hot midsummer's petted crone,
Sweet to me thy drowsy tone
Tells of countless sunny hours,
Long days, and solid banks of flowers;
Of gulfs of sweetness without bound
In Indian wildernesses found;
Of Syrian peace, immortal leisure,
Firmest cheer, and bird-like pleasure.

The very genius of dreamy May and voluptuous June seems to brood over the above lines. A few such passages would be enough to redeem the character of the American Muse from the charge of barrenness and want of originality. Mr. Emerson looks on nature and the visible universe with the eye of a poet and a man of science both. He is a Wordsworth and Linnaeus combined. New-England scenery is almost as much indebted to him as the lakes and mountain regions of Northern England are to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and De Quincey. Mount Monadnock, since it has been embalmed in Emerson's verse, need not fear to lift its head beside the most vaunted hill visible from Rydal Mount, where not long since lived the great English high-priest of nature. Emerson's "Monadnock" is one of the richest, most suggestive, and picturesque pieces in the language. What Wordsworth called "the power of hills" must have been on him when he wrote it. The tall form of Monadnock towers in his verse with as much majesty as it does in its native heavens, and henceforth is entitled to be ranked with those immemorial mountains of the Old World, renowned in song.

Cheshire's haughty hill

has its poet, too, as well as the giant Swiss mountain, whose shadow glides over the valley of Chamouni. A voice, perhaps of the Genius of Monadnock, summons the poet:

Up!—If thou know'st who calls
To twilight parks of beech and pine,
High over the river intervals,
Above the ploughman's highest line,
Over the owner's farthest walls!

…. .

Mr. Emerson's poetry concerns itself but little with human joys or sorrows. His Muse oftenest affects the "heights of abstract contemplation." His religion (for it is on this subject that his Muse chiefly delights to dwell) appears to be borrowed from Plato and the dreamy mystics of the Ganges. The visible universe, with its myriad forms of animal, vegetable, mineral, and impalpable aerial existences, is in his view simply a masquerade of the World-Soul or Godhead, an infinite variation of the eternal unit, a monad which underlies and constitutes everything. God is a vast impersonal, unimpassioned energy merely, a "vivida vis," or creative potency. Man himself, though the highest manifestation of Deity, is, so far as his identity and individual being are concerned, a mere foam-bell, which arises for a moment on the rushing tides of existence, and is quickly reabsorbed into the oceanic essence of Deity….

It seems to us, in our ignorance, not a little singular that Emerson, with his keen intellect, piercing as a Damascus blade, and his upright moral character, could deliberately turn away from what he himself calls

The riches of sweet Mary's son,
Boy-Rabbi, Israel's paragon,

to the altars of a vague, defied abstraction, like the Platonic Zeus or the Oriental Brahma, for such, as near as we can gather, is the God of his idolatry.

But to attempt anything like a careful examination of Emerson's poems within the compass of a short essay would be impossible, for each would furnish matter sufficient for an article. Suffice it to say, that these poems are among the most remarkable contributions to the literature of the present age, and as such they will undoubtedly be regarded by posterity.