in the florid costume of verse is the divine right of the poet.  Passion that must express itself longs always for the freedom of rhythmic utterance.  And in spite of the exaggeration and extravagance which shield themselves under the claim of poetic license, I venture to affirm that “In vino veritas” is not truer than In carmine veritas.  As a further illustration of what has just been said of the self-revelations to be looked for in verse, and in Emerson’s verse more especially, let the reader observe how freely he talks about his bodily presence and infirmities in his poetry,—­subjects he never referred to in prose, except incidentally, in private letters.

Emerson is so essentially a poet that whole pages of his are like so many litanies of alternating chants and recitations.  His thoughts slip on and off their light rhythmic robes just as the mood takes him, as was shown in the passage I have quoted in prose and in verse.  Many of the metrical preludes to his lectures are a versified and condensed abstract of the leading doctrine of the discourse.  They are a curious instance of survival; the lecturer, once a preacher, still wants his text; and finds his scriptural motto in his own rhythmic inspiration.

Shall we rank Emerson among the great poets or not?

    “The great poets are judged by the frame of mind they induce; and to
    them, of all men, the severest criticism is due.”

These are Emerson’s words in the Preface to “Parnassus.”

His own poems will stand this test as well as any in the language.  They lift the reader into a higher region of thought and feeling.  This seems to me a better test to apply to them than the one which Mr. Arnold cited from Milton.  The passage containing this must be taken, not alone, but with the context.  Milton had been speaking of “Logic” and of “Rhetoric,” and spoke of poetry “as being less subtile and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate.”  This relative statement, it must not be forgotten, is conditioned by what went before.  If the terms are used absolutely, and not comparatively, as Milton used them, they must be very elastic if they would stretch widely enough to include all the poems which the world recognizes as masterpieces, nay, to include some of the best of Milton’s own.

In spite of what he said about himself in his letter to Carlyle, Emerson was not only a poet, but a very remarkable one.  Whether a great poet or not will depend on the scale we use and the meaning we affix to the term.  The heat at eighty degrees of Fahrenheit is one thing and the heat at eighty degrees of Reaumur is a very different matter.  The rank of poets is a point of very unstable equilibrium.  From the days of Homer to our own, critics have been disputing about the place to be assigned to this or that member of the poetic hierarchy.  It is not the most popular poet who is necessarily the greatest; Wordsworth never