Emerson’s books, prose and verse, remain with us and still live,—“the precious life-blood of a masterspirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” That they are companionable is proved by the way all sorts of companionable people love them. I know a Pullman car conductor who swears by Emerson. A young French Canadian woodsman, (who is going to work his way
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 through college,) told me the other day that he liked Emerson’s essays better than any other English book that he had read. Restive girls and boys of the “new generation” find something in him which appeals to them; reading farmers of New England and the West prefer him to Plato; even academic professors and politicians qualifying for statesmen feel his stimulating and liberating influence, although (or perhaps because) he sometimes says such hard things about them. I guess that nothing yet written in America is likely to live longer than Emerson’s best work.
His prose is better known and more admired than his verse, for several reasons: first, because he took more pains to make the form of it as perfect as he could; second, because it has a wider range and an easier utterance; third, because it has more touches of wit and of familiarity with the daily doings of men; and finally, because the majority of readers probably prefer prose for silent reading, since the full charm of good verse is revealed only in reading aloud.
But for all that, with Emerson, (as with a writer
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 so different as Matthew Arnold,) I find something in the poems which is not in the essays,—a more pure and subtle essence of what is deepest in the man. Poetry has a power of compression which is beyond prose. It says less and suggests more.
Emerson wrote to the girl whom he afterwards married: “I am born a poet,—of a low class without doubt, but a poet.... My singing, to be sure, is very husky and is for the most part in prose. Still I am a poet in the sense of a perceiver and dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul and in matter, and specially of the correspondence between them.” This is penetrating self-criticism. That he was “of a low class” as poet is more than doubtful,—an error of modesty. But that his singing was often “husky” cannot be denied. He never troubled himself to learn the art of song. The music of verse, in which Longfellow gained such mastery, and Lowell and Whittier had such native gifts, is not often found in Emerson’s poetry. His measures rarely flow with freedom and harmony. They are alternately stiff and spasmodic, and the rhymes are sometimes threadbare, sometimes eccentric.
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 Many of his poems are so condensed, so tight-packed with thought and information that they seem to labour along like an overladen boat in a choppy sea. For example, this:
“The journeying atoms,
Primordial wholes,
Firmly draw, firmly drive,
By their animate poles.”
Or this:
“Puny man and scentless rose
Tormenting Pan to double the dose.”
But for these defects of form Emerson as poet makes ample amends by the richness and accuracy of his observation of nature, by the vigorous flight of his imagination, by the depth and at times the passionate controlled intensity of his feeling. Of love-poetry he has none, except the philosophical. Of narrative poetry he has practically none, unless you count such brief, vivid touches as,—
“By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.”
But his descriptive pieces are of a rare beauty and charm, truthful in broad outline and delicate detail,
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 every flower and every bird in its right colour and place. Walking with him you see and breathe New England in the light of early morn, with the dew sparkling on the grass and all the cosmic forces working underneath it. His reflective and symbolic poems, like Each and All, The Problem, Forerunners, Days, The Sphinx, are full of a searching and daring imaginative power. He has also the genius of the perfect phrase.
“The frolic architecture of the snow.”
“Earth proudly wears the Parthenon,
As the best gem upon her zone”
“The silent organ loudest chants
The Master’s requiem.”
“Music pours on mortals
Its beautiful disdain.”
“Over the winter glaciers,
I see the summer glow,
And through the wild-piled snowdrift
The warm rose-buds below.”
“I thenceforward and long after,
Listen for their harp-like laughter,
And carry in my heart, for days,
Peace that hallows rudest ways.”
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His Threnody, written after the early death of his first-born son, has always seemed to me one of the most moving elegies in the English tongue. His patriotic poems, especially the Concord Ode, are unsurpassed as brief, lyrical utterances of the spirit of America. In certain moods, when the mind is in vigour and the windows of far vision open at a touch, Emerson’s small volume of Poems is a most companionable book.
As his prose sometimes intrudes into his verse and checks its flow, so his poetry often runs over into his prose and illuminates it. What could be more poetic in conception than this sentence from his first book, Nature? “If the stars should appear but one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!”
Emerson’s Essays are a distillation of his lectures. His way of making these was singular and all his own. It was his habit to keep note-books in which he jotted down bits of observation about nature,
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 stray thoughts and comparisons, reflections on his reading, and striking phrases which came to him in meditation or talk. Choosing a subject he planted it in his mind and waited for ideas and illustrations to come to it, as birds or insects to a flower. When a thought appeared he followed it, “as a boy might hunt a butterfly,” and when it was captured he pinned it in his “thought-book.” No doubt there were mental laws at work all the time, giving guidance and direction to the process of composition which seemed so irregular and haphazard. There is no lack of vital uni............