man ; indeed, he is one of the most gifted of our countrymen, and is largely endowed with the true poetic temperament and genius. He has a rich and servid imagination, a refined taste, exquisite sensibility, a strong and acute intellect, and a warm and loving heart. He is earnest and solemn, and, taking his own point of view, a man of high and noble aims. If truth were no essential ingredient of poetry, if the earthly were the celestial, and man were God, and if the highest excellence of song consisted in its being a low and melodious wail, we know not where to look for any thing superior to some of the wonderful productions collected in the volume before us.

But the palm of excellence, even under the relation of art, belongs not to poetry which chants falsehood and evil. The poet is an artist, and the aim of the artist is to realize or embody the beautiful ; but the beautiful is never separable from the true and the good. Truth, goodness, beauty, are only three phases of one and the same thing. God is the True, the Good, the Fair. As the object of the intellect, he is

. the True ; as the object of the will, the Good; as the object of the imagination, the passions, and emotions, the Beautiful; but under whichever phase or aspect we may contemplate him, he is always one and the same infinite, eternal God, indivisible and indistinguishable. In his works it is always the same. In them, no more than in him, is the beautiful detached or separable from the true and the good ; it is never any thing but one phase of what under another aspect is good, and under still another true. The artist must imitate nature, and he fails just in proportion as he fails to realize the true and the good in his productions. His productions must be fitted to satisfy man in his integrity. We have reason and will, as well as imagination; and when we contemplate a work of art, we do it as reasonable and moral as well as imaginative beings, and we are dissatisfied with it, if it fail to satisfy us under the relation of reason or will, as much as if it fail to satisfy us under that of the imagination.

Moreover, the beauty which the artist seeks to embody is objective, not subjective, - an emanation from God, not something in or projected from the human soul. Mr. Emerson and the Transcendentalists contend that beauty is something real, but they make it purely ideal. With them, it is not something which exists out of man and independent of him, and therefore something which he objectively beholds and contemplates, · but something in man himself, dependent solely on his own internal state, and his manner of seeing himself and the world around him. But the ideal and the real are not identical; and if the beautiful were the projection or creation of the human soul, and dependent on our internal state and manner of seeing, it would be variable, one thing with one man and another thing with another, one thing this moment, another the next. We should have no criterion of taste, no standard of criticism ; art would cease to have its laws; and the boasted science of æsthetics, so highly prized by Transcendentalists, and on which they pride themselves, would be only a dream. Beauty is no more individual, subjective, than is truth or goodness. It neither proceeds from nor is addressed to what is individual, idiosyncratic ; but it proceeds from the universal and permanent, and appeals to what, in a degree, is common to all men, and inseparable and indistinguishable from the essential nature of man.

Mr. Emerson's poems, therefore, fail in all the higher requisites of art. They embody a doctrine essentially false, a morality essentially unsound, and at best a beauty which is partial, individual. To be able to regard them as embodying the beautiful, in any worthy sense of the term, one must cease to be what he is, must divest himself of his own individuality, and that not to fall back on our common humanity, but to become Mr. Emerson, and to see only after his peculiar manner of seeing. They are addressed, not to all men, but to a school, a peculiar school, a very small school, composed of individuals who, by nature or education, have similar notions, tastes, and idiosyncrasies. As artistic productions, then, notwithstanding they indicate, on the part of their author, poetical genius of the highest order, they can claim no elevated rank. The author's genius is cramped, confined, and perverted by his false philosophy and morality, and the best thing we can say of his poems is, that they indicate the longing of his spirit for a truth, a morality, a freedom, a peace, a repose, which he feels and laments he has not.

We know Mr. Emerson ; we have shared his generous hospitality, and enjoyed the charms of his conversation ; as a friend and neighbour, in all the ordinary relations of social and domestic life, he is one it is not easy to help loving and admiring; and we confess we are loath to say aught severe against him or his works ; but his volume of poems is the saddest book we ever read. The author tries to cheer

stant round the mouth, but does not come from the heart, or lighten the eyes. He talks of music and flowers, and would fain persuade us that he is weaving garlands of joy ; but beneath them is always to be seen the ghastly and grinning, skeleton of death. There is an appearance of calm, of quiet, of repose, and at first sight one may half fancy his soul is as placid, as peaceful, as the unruffled lake sleeping sweetly beneath the summer moonbeams ; but it is the calm, the quiet, the repose

; of despair. Down below are the troubled waters. The world is no joyous world for him. It is void and without form, and darkness broods over it. True, he bears up against it ; but because he is too proud to complain, and because he believes his lot is that of all men and inevitable. Why break thy head against the massive walls of necessity ? Call your darkness light, and it will be as light — to you. Look the fiend in the face, and he is your friend, - at least, as much of a friend as

, you can have. Why complain ? Poor brother, thou art nothing, or thou art all. Crouch and whine, and thou art nothing ; stand up erect on thy own two feet, and scorn to ask for aught beyond thyself, and thou art all. Yet this stoical pride and resolve require a violent effort, and bring no peace, no consolation, to the soul. In an evil hour, the author overbeard what the serpent said to Eve, and believed it; and from that time, it would seem, he became unable to believe aught else. He loves and wooes nature, for he fancies her beauty and loveliness emanate from the divinity of his own being ; and he affects to walk the fields and the woods, as a god surveying his own handiwork. It is he that gives the rose its fragrance, the rainbow its tints, the golden sunset its gorgeous bues. But the illusion does not last. He feels, after all, that he is a man, only a man; and the enigma of his own being,

“ The fate of the man-child,

The meaning of man," torments him, and from his inmost soul cries out, and in no lullaby tones, for a solution. But, alas ! no solution comes ; if

one, it is a solution which solves nothing, which brings no light, no repose, to the spirit wearied with its questionings. As a proof of this, take the poem with which the volume opens, entitled The Sphinr. In this the author proposes and attempts to solve the problem of man. He begins by chanting the peace, harmony, and loveliness of external nature, and proceeds :NEW SERIES. —

34

or,

VOL. I. NO. II.

"The fiend that man harries
Is love of the Best ;
Yawns the pit of the Dragon,
Lit by rays from the Blest.
The Lethe of nature

Can't trance him again,
Whose soul sees the Perfect,
Which his eyes seek in vain.

"Profounder, profounder,
Man's spirit must dive;
To his aye-rolling orbit
No goal will arrive ;

The heavens that now draw him

With sweetness untold,
Once found, for new heavens
He spurneth the old.

"Pride ruined the angels,

Their shame them restores;

And the joy that is sweetest
Lurks in stings of remorse.
Have I a lover

Who is noble and free?
I would he were nobler
Than to love me.

"Eterne alternation,

Now follows, now flies;
And under pain, pleasure,
Under pleasure, pain lies.
Love works at the centre,
Heart-heaving alway ;
Forth speed the strong pulses
To the borders of day.

"Dull Sphinx, Jove keep thy five wits!
Thy sight is growing blear;

Rue, myrrh, and cummin for the Sphinx,-
Her muddy eyes to clear!'

The old Sphinx bit her thick lip,

Said, Who taught thee me to name ?

I am thy spirit, yoke-fellow,

Of thine eye I am eyebeam.

"Thou art the unanswered question;
Couldst see thy proper eye,
Alway it asketh, asketh ;

And each answer is a lie.
So take thy quest through nature,
It through thousand natures ply;
Ask on, thou clothed eternity;

Time is the false reply.'" pp. 9-13.

The contrast between moral and physical is founded in fancy. The disorders of the external world are not less striking than those of man, and the strife of elements is as terrible as that of the passions. There are blight and mildew, earthquakes and volcanoes, floods and droughts, in nature, as well as wars and revolutions in states and empires. But let this pass. Whence comes the evil in man? "The fiend that man harries is love of the Best." That is, man is never satisfied with what he has; but imagines that he sees always something better just beyond and above him. Advance or ascend as he may, the Ideal floats ever before him, urging him on, and bidding him climb higher up, ever higher up yet.