SVEN. But I, O father, have begun a song— The chords are strong— The deeds of heroes, in the gray old time, Now hangs my harp forsaken on the tree, ULF. O Sven! the splendour of Our Father's hall He is almighty, and the great stars roll There 'mongst the heroes mayst thou seated be; SVEN. O sire! so youthful and so strong, to die Is agony ! No deeds of prowess on the battle-field And were I sat at Odin's festival, Among the heroes I were least of all. ULF. O Sven! one noble deed is worth a crowd, It is allowed; And has not thou, at thy dear country's need, Here come to bleed? Now look! the foe doth flec; see yonder light— 'Tis Odin guides us to his palace bright! EMERSON AS A POET. BY C. E. TYRER, B.A. W HEN the time comes for estimating the relative rank of American men of letters in the century succeeding the Declaration of Independence, there is one name which we can hardly doubt will claim a place apart from, and in some respects above, any other. And that is the name of Ralph Waldo Emerson. As an artist, he is immeasurably beneath Hawthorne, and he shows little of that humour, pungent or delicate and subtle, of which Lowell and Holmes (to mention no more) have shown themselves such consummate masters-but, as a thinker and spiritual teacher, expounding in an age and to a people of low ideals the greatness of the soul, his position is unique; and it is by virtue of these qualities, which more than any other attract and influence the higher order of minds, that he towers above all his contemporaries. Bronson Alcott says: Am I extravagant in believing that our people are more indebted to him than they know, becoming still more so? and that, as his thoughts pass into the brain of the coming generation, it will be seen that we have had at least one mind of home growth, if not independent of the old country! I consider his genius the measure and present expansion of the American mind. And to the weight and pregnancy of his thought, Emerson unites a style of exquisite fitness and singular charm. And yet nothing is easier than to depreciate or to sneer at his THE MANCHESter Quarterly. No. X.-APRIL, 1884. pretensions-than to say e.g., as Mr. Thomas Hughes does in his preface to the English edition of the Biglow Papers, that Emerson is "a first-rate counterfeit of genius." For he has produced nothing to force recognition and admiration from the critical and unsympathetic. As a thinker, he has left behind him no strictly-formulated or clearly-developed system; as a man of letters, he has achieved no magnum opus, no imposing array of volumes is inscribed with his name. Occasional essays, lectures, and poems, from time to time collected and given to the world as occasion served, are the only definite tangible result of his labours. Living as Emerson did for thought, and for literature as the vehicle of thought, there was never perhaps any man of letters less adept as a book-maker than he. Rigidly declining to publish anything but what he felt to be worthy of him, he assiduously polished and pruned his essays and lectures before giving them to the world; and it is probable that he has left in manuscript matter equal to, if not exceeding in bulk, that of his published writings. In speaking of Emerson as a poet (in the stricter sense of the word), I do not mean for a moment to imply that there is not much poetry, and that of a high kind, in his prose writings. Such exquisite productions as the essays on "Love" and "Friendship," and the "Address to the Senior Class in Divinity College," would suffice to prove that their author had the keenest poetic sensibility, even though, in Wordsworth's language, he wanted "the accomplishment of verse." He would in that case be not unjustly numbered in the distinguished band of prose poets, which includes Richter, De Quincey, and Hawthorne, and also (though they have not entirely abjured the form of verse) Ruskin and Carlyle. Indeed, perhaps Emerson's place is most properly with these, for the impulse to write verse scems with him to have been only occasional, and prose to |