“Have I a lover
    Who is noble and free?—­
  I would he were nobler
    Than to love me.”

The commonplace young person will be apt to say or think c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas—­l’amour.

The third poem in the volume, “The Problem,” should have stood first in order.  This ranks among the finest of Emerson’s poems.  All his earlier verse has a certain freshness which belongs to the first outburst of song in a poetic nature.  “Each and All,” “The Humble-Bee,” “The Snow-Storm,” should be read before “Uriel,” “The World-Soul,” or “Mithridates.”  “Monadnoc” will be a good test of the reader’s taste for Emerson’s poetry, and after this “Woodnotes.”

In studying his poems we must not overlook the delicacy of many of their descriptive portions.  If in the flights of his imagination he is like the strong-winged bird of passage, in his exquisite choice of descriptive epithets he reminds me of the tenui-rostrals. His subtle selective instinct penetrates the vocabulary for the one word he wants, as the long, slender bill of those birds dives deep into the flower for its drop of honey.  Here is a passage showing admirably the two different conditions:  wings closed and the selective instinct picking out its descriptive expressions; then suddenly wings flashing open and the imagination in the firmament, where it is always at home.  Follow the pitiful inventory of insignificances of the forlorn being he describes with a pathetic humor more likely to bring a sigh than a smile, and then mark the grand hyperbole of the last two lines.  The passage is from the poem called “Destiny":—­

  “Alas! that one is born in blight,
  Victim of perpetual slight: 
  When thou lookest on his face,
  Thy heart saith ’Brother, go thy ways! 
  None shall ask thee what thou doest,
  Or care a rush for what thou knowest. 
  Or listen when thou repliest,
  Or remember where thou liest,
  Or how thy supper is sodden;’
  And another is born
  To make the sun forgotten.”

Of all Emerson’s poems the “Concord Hymn” is the most nearly complete and faultless,—­but it is not distinctively Emersonian.  It is such a poem as Collins might have written,—­it has the very movement and melody of the “Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson,” and of the “Dirge in Cymbeline,” with the same sweetness and tenderness of feeling.  Its one conspicuous line,

  “And fired the shot heard round the world,”

must not take to itself all the praise deserved by this perfect little poem, a model for all of its kind.  Compact, expressive, serene, solemn, musical, in four brief stanzas it tells the story of the past, records the commemorative act of the passing day, and invokes the higher Power that governs the future to protect the Memorial-stone sacred to Freedom and her martyrs.

These poems of Emerson’s find the readers that must listen to them and delight in them, as the “Ancient Mariner” fastened upon the man who must hear him.  If any doubter wishes to test his fitness for reading them, and if the poems already mentioned are not enough to settle the question, let him read the paragraph of “May-Day,” beginning,—­