There is one trick of verse which Emerson occasionally, not very often, indulges in.  This is the crowding of a redundant syllable into a line.  It is a liberty which is not to be abused by the poet.  Shakespeare, the supreme artist, and Milton, the “mighty-mouth’d inventor of harmonies,” knew how to use it effectively.  Shelley employed it freely.  Bryant indulged in it occasionally, and wrote an article in an early number of the “North American Review” in defence of its use.  Willis was fond of it.  As a relief to monotony it may be now and then allowed,—­may even have an agreeable effect in breaking the monotony of too formal verse.  But it may easily become a deformity and a cause of aversion.  A humpback may add picturesqueness to a procession, but if there are too many humpbacks in line we turn away from the sight of them.  Can any ear reconcile itself to the last of these three lines of Emerson’s?

  “Oh, what is Heaven but the fellowship
  Of minds that each can stand against the world
  By its own meek and incorruptible will?”

These lines that lift their backs up in the middle—­span-worm lines, we may call them—­are not to be commended for common use because some great poets have now and then admitted them.  They have invaded some of our recent poetry as the canker-worms gather on our elms in June.  Emerson has one or two of them here and there, but they never swarm on his leaves so as to frighten us away from their neighborhood.

As for the violently artificial rhythms and rhymes which have reappeared of late in English and American literature, Emerson would as soon have tried to ride three horses at once in a circus as to shut himself up in triolets, or attempt any cat’s-cradle tricks of rhyming sleight of hand.

If we allow that Emerson is not a born singer, that he is a careless versifier and rhymer, we must still recognize that there is something in his verse which belongs, indissolubly, sacredly, to his thought.  Who would decant the wine of his poetry from its quaint and antique-looking lagena?—­Read his poem to the Aeolian harp ("The Harp”) and his model betrays itself:—­

  “These syllables that Nature spoke,
  And the thoughts that in him woke
  Can adequately utter none
  Save to his ear the wind-harp lone. 
  Therein I hear the Parcae reel
  The threads of man at their humming wheel,
  The threads of life and power and pain,
  So sweet and mournful falls the strain. 
  And best can teach its Delphian chord
  How Nature to the soul is moored,
  If once again that silent string,
  As erst it wont, would thrill and ring.”

There is no need of quoting any of the poems which have become familiar to most true lovers of poetry.  Emerson saw fit to imitate the Egyptians by placing “The Sphinx” at the entrance of his temple of song.  This poem was not fitted to attract worshippers.  It is not easy of comprehension, not pleasing in movement.  As at first written it had one verse in it which sounded so much like a nursery rhyme that Emerson was prevailed upon to omit it in the later versions.  There are noble passages in it, but they are for the adept and not for the beginner.  A commonplace young person taking up the volume and puzzling his or her way along will come by and by to the verse:—­