contemplates so as to show the relations which unite, and learn the laws that govern, the subjects of his study.  The poet links the most remote objects together by the slender filament of wit, the flowery chain of fancy, or the living, pulsating cord of imagination, always guided by his instinct for the beautiful.  The man of science clings to his object, as the marsupial embryo to its teat, until he has filled himself as full as he can hold; the poet takes a sip of his dew-drop, throws his head up like a chick, rolls his eyes around in contemplation of the heavens above him and the universe in general, and never thinks of asking a Linnaean question as to the flower that furnished him his dew-drop.  The poetical and scientific natures rarely coexist; Haller and Goethe are examples which show that such a union may occur, but as a rule the poet is contented with the colors of the rainbow and leaves the study of Fraunhofer’s lines to the man of science.

Though far from being a man of science, Emerson was a realist in the best sense of that word.  But his realities reached to the highest heavens:  like Milton,—­

  “He passed the flaming bounds of place and time;
  The living throne, the sapphire blaze
  Where angels tremble while they gaze,
  HE SAW”—­

Everywhere his poetry abounds in celestial imagery.  If Galileo had been a poet as well as an astronomer, he would hardly have sowed his verse thicker with stars than we find them in the poems of Emerson.

Not less did Emerson clothe the common aspects of life with the colors of his imagination.  He was ready to see beauty everywhere:—­

  “Thou can’st not wave thy staff in air,
  Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
  But it carves the bow of beauty there,
  And the ripples in rhyme the oar forsake.”

He called upon the poet to

  “Tell men what they knew before;
  Paint the prospect from their door.”

And his practice was like his counsel.  He saw our plain New England life with as honest New England eyes as ever looked at a huckleberry-bush or into a milking-pail.

This noble quality of his had its dangerous side.  In one of his exalted moods he would have us

  “Give to barrows, trays and pans
  Grace and glimmer of romance.”

But in his Lecture on “Poetry and Imagination,” he says:—­

    “What we once admired as poetry has long since come to be a sound
    of tin pans; and many of our later books we have outgrown.  Perhaps
    Homer and Milton will be tin pans yet.”

The “grace and glimmer of romance” which was to invest the tin pan are forgotten, and he uses it as a belittling object for comparison.  He himself was not often betrayed into the mistake of confounding the prosaic with the poetical, but his followers, so far as the “realists” have taken their hint from him, have done it most thoroughly.  Mr. Whitman enumerates all the objects he happens