“are but sailing foam-bells
  Along thought’s causing stream.”

Shakespeare does not forget that the world will one day vanish “like the baseless fabric of a vision,” and that we ourselves are “such stuff as dreams are made on;” but this is not the mood in which he dwells.  Again:  while it is for the philosopher to reduce variety to unity, it is the poet’s task to detect the manifold under uniformity.  In the great creative poets, in Shakespeare and Dante and Goethe, how infinite the swarm of persons, the multitude of forms!  But with Emerson the type is important, the common element.  “In youth we are mad for persons.  But the larger experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing through them all.”  “The same—­the same!” he exclaims in his essay on Plato.  “Friend and foe are of one stuff; the plowman, the plow, and the furrow are of one stuff.”  And this is the thought in Brahma: 

  “They reckon ill who leave me out;
    When me they fly I am the wings: 
  I am the doubter find the doubt,
    And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.”

It is not easy to fancy a writer who holds this altitude toward “persons” descending to the composition of a novel or a play.  Emerson showed, indeed, a fine power of character-analysis in his English Traits and Representative Men and in his memoirs of Thoreau and Margaret Fuller.  There is even a sort of dramatic humor in his portrait of Socrates.  But upon the whole he stands midway between constructive artists, whose instinct it is to tell a story or sing a song, and philosophers, like Schelling, who give poetic expression to a system of thought.  He belongs to the class of minds of which Sir Thomas Browne is the best English example.  He set a high value upon Browne, to whose style his own, though far more sententious, bears a resemblance.  Browne’s saying, for example, “All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God,” sounds like Emerson, whose workmanship, for the rest, in his prose essays was exceedingly fine and close.  He was not afraid to be homely and racy in expressing thought of the highest spirituality.  “Hitch your wagon to a star” is a good instance of his favorite manner.

Emerson’s verse often seems careless in technique.  Most of his pieces are scrappy and have the air of runic rimes, or little oracular “voicings”—­as they say at Concord—­in rhythmic shape, of single thoughts on “Worship,” “Character,” “Heroism,” “Art,” “Politics,” “Culture,” etc.  The content is the important thing, and the form is too frequently awkward or bald.  Sometimes, indeed, in the clear-obscure of Emerson’s poetry the deep wisdom of the thought finds its most natural expression in the imaginative simplicity of the language.  But though this artlessness in him became too frequently in his imitators, like Thoreau and Ellery Channing, an obtruded simplicity, among his own poems are many that leave nothing to be desired in point of wording and of verse.  His Hymn Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument, in 1836, is the perfect model of an occasional poem.  Its lines were on every one’s lips at the time of the centennial celebrations in 1876, and “the shot heard round the world” has hardly echoed farther than the song which chronicled it.  Equally current is the stanza from Voluntaries: