had half the popularity of Scott or Moore.  It is not the multitude of remembered passages which settles the rank of a metrical composition as poetry.  Gray’s “Elegy,” it is true, is full of lines we all remember, and is a great poem, if that term can be applied to any piece of verse of that length.  But what shall we say to the “Ars Poetica” of Horace?  It is crowded with lines worn smooth as old sesterces by constant quotation.  And yet we should rather call it a versified criticism than a poem in the full sense of that word.  And what shall we do with Pope’s “Essay on Man,” which has furnished more familiar lines than “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise Regained” both together?  For all that, we know there is a school of writers who will not allow that Pope deserves the name of poet.

It takes a generation or two to find out what are the passages in a great writer which are to become commonplaces in literature and conversation.  It is to be remembered that Emerson is one of those authors whose popularity must diffuse itself from above downwards.  And after all, few will dare assert that “The Vanity of Human Wishes” is greater as a poem than Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” or Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” because no line in either of these poems is half so often quoted as

  “To point a moral or adorn a tale.”

We cannot do better than begin our consideration of Emerson’s poetry with Emerson’s own self-estimate.  He says in a fit of humility, writing to Carlyle:—­

    “I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low department of
    literature, the reporters, suburban men.”

But Miss Peabody writes to Mr. Ireland:—­

    “He once said to me, ’I am not a great poet—­but whatever is of me
    is a poet.’”

These opposite feelings were the offspring of different moods and different periods.

Here is a fragment, written at the age of twenty-eight, in which his self-distrust and his consciousness of the “vision,” if not “the faculty, divine,” are revealed with the brave nudity of the rhythmic confessional:—­

  “A dull uncertain brain,
  But gifted yet to know
  That God has cherubim who go
  Singing an immortal strain,
  Immortal here below. 
  I know the mighty bards,
  I listen while they sing,
  And now I know
  The secret store
  Which these explore
  When they with torch of genius pierce
  The tenfold clouds that cover
  The riches of the universe
  From God’s adoring lover. 
  And if to me it is not given
  To fetch one ingot thence
  Of that unfading gold of Heaven
  His merchants may dispense,
  Yet well I know the royal mine
    And know the sparkle of its ore,
  Know Heaven’s truth from lies that shine,—­
    Explored, they teach us to explore.”

These lines are from “The Poet,” a series of fragments given in the “Appendix,” which, with his first volume, “Poems,” his second, “May-Day, and other Pieces,” form the complete ninth volume of the new series.  These fragments contain some of the loftiest and noblest passages to be found in his poetical works, and if the reader should doubt which of Emerson’s self-estimates in his two different moods spoken of above had most truth in it, he could question no longer after reading “The Poet.”