reader." Of Saadi, he says: "Through his Persian dialect he speaks to all nations, and like Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Montaigne, is perpetually modern." In his long poem dedicated to this serene old bard-who is said to have divided his life up into sections of about thirty years for experience, meditation, and travel, and who devoted the last thirty and more of them, until he died, aged 102, to meditation and literary work-Emerson says:

His words, like a storm-wind, can bring
Terror and beauty on their wing;
In his every syllable

Lurketh nature veritable;

And though he speak in midnight dark,—
In heaven no star, on earth no spark,-
Yet before the listener's eye

Swims the world in ecstasy.

The forest waves, the morning breaks,
The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes,
Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons be,
And life pulsates in rock or tree.
Saadi, so far thy words shall reach;
Suns rise and set in Saadi's speech!

How dearly Emerson likes a deep and wide utterance. He welcomes and hugs the thought which sweeps over a broad swath. Nothing less than less than the whole curve which reaches from sunrise to sunset will satisfy him. It is our littleness, our monotony- he would tell us- -that reprobates a foreign garb of speech, or terms a remote manner provincial. The universality, scope, and depth which he attains give to his outlines the breadth and largeness of cartoons which rest against an unlimited background. The extent of his draught, like that which Thor took from the drinking-horn of the giants at Jötunheim, seems to imply an oceanic ebb and the motion of cosmic currents.

I am perpetually impressed with the high majesty and solemnity of Emerson's If it touches anything trivial or

muse.

commonplace, it does not leave it so. "When we speak of the poet in any high sense," he writes, "we are driven to such examples as Zoroaster and Plato, St. John and Menu, with their moral burdens." If the spiritual purpose and pretension of the old Greek oracles stood buttressed behind its utterance, it could not well be more earnest or more oracular. How he uses and respects his art may be judged by this extract from his poem of “The Problem."

Not from a vain or shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought;
Never from lips of cunning fell
The thrilling Delphic oracle;

Out from the heart of nature rolled

The burdens of the Bible old;

The litanies of nations came,

Like the volcano's tongue of flame,
Up from the burning core below,―
The canticles of love and woe;

The hand that rounded Peter's dome

And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,

Wrought in a sad sincerity;

Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew,-
The conscious stone to beauty grew.

A sense of dignity and reverent beauty transfuses his artistic expression, and is never absent from his thought. The artist, whoever he be-in the Emersonian horoscope-works in "love and terror." He translates the soul of things; and, faithfully spelling out the elusive secrets of Nature and the human heart, finds that he, too, is adjudged a part of the great scheme.

In the same poem he says:

Earth proudly wears the Parthenon,
As the best gem upon her zone;
And morning opes with haste her lids
To gaze upon the Pyramids;

O'er England's abbeys bends the sky,
As on its friends, with kindred eye,—
For, out of thought's interior sphere,
These wonders rose to upper air;

And Nature gladly gave them place,
Adopted them into her race,

And granted them an equal date
With Andes and with Ararat.

Who, now, is the poet that Emerson recognizes, and how shall we describe him? In a suggestive summary he puts the traits of this interpreter in the opening of his exquisite "Woodnotes":

When the pine tosses its cones
To the song of its waterfall tones,
Who speeds to the woodland walks?
To birds and trees who talks?
Cæsar of his leafy Rome,
There the poet is at home.
He goes to the river-side,-
Not hook nor line hath he;

He stands in the meadows wide,

Nor gun nor scythe to see:

Sure some god his eye enchants:
What he knows nobody wants.