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XII.

EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE.

BY WILLIAM T. HARRIS.

THE eminent physicist, Tyndall, has told us that he considers Emerson a profoundly religious influence. Emerson accepted all new discoveries in science without dismay, and without loss of reverence or of faith in the supremacy of the divine in the world. This certainly is a trait that belongs to a religious nature.

There is another aspect of science, that of its relation to poetry or poetic art, that interests us when we take up Emerson's poetry. It has been supposed by some that the age of poetry is now past, and no longer possible, because of the advent of modern natural science and the invention of labor-saving machines. "The Muses have fled and Nature is forever disenchanted." If this were true, the spiritual uses of Nature would have become obsolete. Nature could not be used as a symbol of mind and a means of expression of spiritual nature. An iron age of empty show and pretence would indeed be upon us; for no poetic tropes or metaphors could be found

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with which we could express invisible nature by visible images. If such were used, they must needs be feigned, a sham performance imitating consciously the Greek view of Nature, which was a genuine one. An age of hollowness and insincerity, profoundly sceptical of the very existence of spiritual things, is bound to appear when men lose their insight into the correspondence between the material and spiritual, and cease to regard nature as the type whose archetype is mind. Accordingly in this epoch of prose science and machinery an unusual interest attaches to the work of its poets. The original poet of this time is the one that makes incursions into the realm of nature, with the aid of the newest scientific theories, and is able to discover spiritual correspondences in prose realities, whether they be cosmic laws or mere machines.

It is in this important field that Emerson may be regarded as the poet of the future. He sees in their poetic aspect the generalizations of astronomy, geology, and biology, - the theories of nebular consolidation and the evolution of life. The essential characteristic of poetry is to be found in metaphor and personification rather than in the forms of rhythm and rhyme. Hebrew poetry, for example, although the most sublime species of poetry, has no rhythm and rhyme, but only parallelism and correspondence, for its external dress. Much of the so-called poetry lacks metaphor and personification, although it possesses the jingle of rhyme and its metres are perfect.

Such writing lacks the poetic vision that sees the invisible and spiritual in the visible and material. Hence the attempt to use modern discoveries in natural science for poetic matter has for the most part failed, by reason of the lack of a deeper insight which discerned their spiritual significance.

Emerson's poetry abounds in metaphors taken from the modern theories of nature. His spiritual vision pierces through the prose hull to the vital kernel.

The freshness and wildness of nature as depicted by Shakspeare in his lyrics, such, for example, as "Under the greenwood tree," and "When icicles hang by the wall," may be found in Emerson's poems of nature, especially the "Woodnotes," "May-Day," "The Rhodora," "Hamnatreya," "My Garden," "The Titmouse," and "Sea-Shore."

The beauty of nature demands a certain neglect of regularity and symmetry, in order to reach freedom and gracefulness by suggesting boundless resources of form, and emancipation from mechanical conformity to laws and types. There is in this a sort of justification for Emerson's apparent carelessness in respect to metre. In the nature-poems especially there is a suggestion of the transcendency over all mechanism which we always see when we look at the world in masses and put by our analytical spectacles of species and genera and laws. How restful and refreshing are the glimpses of genuine untamed nature offered us in Shakspeare's poem just now alluded to!

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Here is abrupt transition of rhythm that suggests freedom from conventionality. The resources of poetry are many and adequate. One may not expect to find all moods and all subjects fittingly expressed in one species of poetry. While one range of subjects demands strict sequence of rhyme and perfect measure of rhythm, another range, involving sudden flashes of insight and vast metamorphoses of objects, may require altogether different treatment. In art, the deepest law is the unity of subject and form.

Merlin's idea of the kind of poetry for the wizard bard was this, according to Emerson,—

"Great is the art,

Great be the manners, of the bard.

He shall not his brain encumber
With the coil of rhythm and number;
But, leaving rule and pale forethought,

He shall aye climb

For his rhyme.

'Pass in, pass in,' the angels say,

In to the upper doors,

Nor count compartments of the floors,

But mount to paradise

By the stairway of surprise.""

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"Machine poetry" is over-careful of its metre and rhyme. Those who "write poetry fit to put round frosted cake," among whom Emerson places the poets of the epoch of Queen Anne, seldom take any flights into the realm of the inspired bard. They do not conquer any new realm of nature, and reduce it by trope or personification to the symbol of spiritual nature. They use only the old conventional metaphors. But the realm of true poetry, like "the potent plane of Dæmons, spreads"

"Close, close to men,

Like undulating layer of air,
Right above their heads."

The brave poet may surely ascend into it if he is always true to his aspiration.

In his poem "Woodnotes" Emerson sings the song of the pine-tree; not a song of the idle fancies of the poet on beholding it, but the song of the thoughtful naturalist, who is above all a poet. He sees in the pinetree the pioneer of vegetation, conquering the drifting sand-heaps, binding together the soil by its roots and covering it with a layer of leaves and branches, by and by to become vegetable mould, in which all plants may flourish. After the pine come other trees, and then animals, and then all is ready for man.

"Whether is better the gift or the donor?

'Come to me,'

Quoth the pine-tree,

'I am the giver of honor.

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