Every true poet has an atmosphere as much as every great painter.  The golden sunshine of Claude and the pearly mist of Corot belonged to their way of looking at nature as much as the color of their eyes and hair belonged to their personalities.  So with the poets; for Wordsworth the air is always serene and clear, for Byron the sky is uncertain between storm and sunshine.  Emerson sees all nature in the same pearly mist that wraps the willows and the streams of Corot.  Without its own characteristic atmosphere, illuminated by

    “The light that never was on sea or land,”

we may have good verse but no true poem.  In his poetry there is not merely this atmosphere, but there is always a mirage in the horizon.

Emerson’s poetry is eminently subjective,—­if Mr. Ruskin, who hates the word, will pardon me for using it in connection with a reference to two of his own chapters in his “Modern Painters.”  These are the chapter on “The Pathetic Fallacy,” and the one which follows it “On Classical Landscape.”  In these he treats of the transfer of a writer’s mental or emotional conditions to the external nature which he contemplates.  He asks his readers to follow him in a long examination of what he calls by the singular name mentioned, “the pathetic fallacy,” because, he says, “he will find it eminently characteristic of the modern mind; and in the landscape, whether of literature or art, he will also find the modern painter endeavoring to express something which he, as a living creature, imagines in the lifeless object, while the classical and mediaeval painters were content with expressing the unimaginary and actual qualities of the object itself.”

Illustrations of Mr. Ruskin’s “pathetic fallacy” may be found almost anywhere in Emerson’s poems.  Here is one which offers itself without search:—­

  “Daily the bending skies solicit man,
  The seasons chariot him from this exile,
  The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing wheels,
  The storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along,
  Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights
  Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home.”

The expression employed by Ruskin gives the idea that he is dealing with a defect.  If he had called the state of mind to which he refers the sympathetic illusion, his readers might have looked upon it more justly.

It would be a pleasant and not a difficult task to trace the resemblances between Emerson’s poetry and that of other poets.  Two or three such resemblances have been incidentally referred to, a few others may be mentioned.

In his contemplative study of Nature he reminds us of Wordsworth, at least in certain brief passages, but he has not the staying power of that long-breathed, not to say long-winded, lover of landscapes.  Both are on the most intimate terms with Nature, but Emerson contemplates himself as belonging to her, while Wordsworth feels as if she belonged to him.