In the notice of “Parnassus” some of his preferences have been already mentioned.

Comparisons between men of genius for the sake of aggrandizing the one at the expense of the other are the staple of the meaner kinds of criticism.  No lover of art will clash a Venetian goblet against a Roman amphora to see which is strongest; no lover of nature undervalues a violet because it is not a rose.  But comparisons used in the way of description are not odious.

The difference between Emerson’s poetry and that of the contemporaries with whom he would naturally be compared is that of algebra and arithmetic.  He deals largely in general symbols, abstractions, and infinite series.  He is always seeing the universal in the particular.  The great multitude of mankind care more for two and two, something definite, a fixed quantity, than for a + b’s and x^{2’s},—­symbols used for undetermined amounts and indefinite possibilities.  Emerson is a citizen of the universe who has taken up his residence for a few days and nights in this travelling caravansary between the two inns that hang out the signs of Venus and Mars.  This little planet could not provincialize such a man.  The multiplication-table is for the every day use of every day earth-people, but the symbols he deals with are too vast, sometimes, we must own, too vague, for the unilluminated terrestrial and arithmetical intelligence.  One cannot help feeling that he might have dropped in upon us from some remote centre of spiritual life, where, instead of addition and subtraction, children were taught quaternions, and where the fourth dimension of space was as familiarly known to everybody as a foot-measure or a yard-stick is to us.  Not that he himself dealt in the higher or the lower mathematics, but he saw the hidden spiritual meaning of things as Professor Cayley or Professor Sylvester see the meaning of their mysterious formulae.  Without using the Rosetta-stone of Swedenborg, Emerson finds in every phenomenon of nature a hieroglyphic.  Others measure and describe the monuments,—­he reads the sacred inscriptions.  How alive he makes Monadnoc!  Dinocrates undertook to “hew Mount Athos to the shape of man” in the likeness of Alexander the Great.  Without the help of tools or workmen, Emerson makes “Cheshire’s haughty hill” stand before us an impersonation of kingly humanity, and talk with us as a god from Olympus might have talked.

This is the fascination of Emerson’s poetry; it moves in a world of universal symbolism.  The sense of the infinite fills it with its majestic presence.  It shows, also, that he has a keen delight in the every-day aspects of nature.  But he looks always with the eye of a poet, never with that of the man of science.  The law of association of ideas is wholly different in the two.  The scientific man connects objects in sequences and series, and in so doing is guided by their collective resemblances.  His aim is to classify and index all that he sees and