to be looking at as if they were equally suggestive to the poetical mind, furnishing his reader a large assortment on which he may exercise the fullest freedom of selection.  It is only giving him the same liberty that Lord Timothy Dexter allowed his readers in the matter of punctuation, by leaving all stops out of his sentences, and printing at the end of his book a page of commas, semicolons, colons, periods, notes of interrogation and exclamation, with which the reader was expected to “pepper” the pages as he might see fit.

French realism does not stop at the tin pan, but must deal with the slop-pail and the wash-tub as if it were literally true that

  “In the mud and scum of things
  There alway, alway something sings.”

Happy were it for the world if M. Zola and his tribe would stop even there; but when they cross the borders of science into its infected districts, leaving behind them the reserve and delicacy which the genuine scientific observer never forgets to carry with him, they disgust even those to whom the worst scenes they describe are too wretchedly familiar.  The true realist is such a man as Parent du Chatelet; exploring all that most tries the senses and the sentiments, and reporting all truthfully, but soberly, chastely, without needless circumstance, or picturesque embellishment, for a useful end, and not for a mere sensational effect.

What a range of subjects from “The Problem” and “Uriel” and “Forerunners” to “The Humble-Bee” and “The Titmouse!” Nor let the reader who thinks the poet must go far to find a fitting theme fail to read the singularly impressive home-poem, “Hamatreya,” beginning with the names of the successive owners of a piece of land in Concord,—­probably the same he owned after the last of them:—­

    “Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint,”

and ending with the austere and solemn “Earth-Song.”

Full of poetical feeling, and with a strong desire for poetical expression, Emerson experienced a difficulty in the mechanical part of metrical composition.  His muse picked her way as his speech did in conversation and in lecturing.  He made desperate work now and then with rhyme and rhythm, showing that though a born poet he was not a born singer.  Think of making “feeble” rhyme with “people,” “abroad” with “Lord,” and contemplate the following couplet which one cannot make rhyme without actual verbicide:—­

  “Where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear,
  And up the tall mast runs the woodpeck"-are!

And how could prose go on all-fours more unmetrically than this?

  “In Adirondac lakes
  At morn or noon the guide rows bare-headed.”

It was surely not difficult to say—­

“At morn or noon bare-headed rows the guide.”  And yet while we note these blemishes, many of us will confess that we like his uncombed verse better, oftentimes, than if it were trimmed more neatly and disposed more nicely.  When he is at his best, his lines flow with careless ease, as a mountain stream tumbles, sometimes rough and sometimes smooth, but all the more interesting for the rocks it runs against and the grating of the pebbles it rolls over.