Some passages of “Nature,” “The Over-Soul,” “The Sphinx,” “Uriel,” illustrate sufficiently this mood of spiritual exaltation.  Emerson’s calm temperament never allowed it to reach the condition he sometimes refers to,—­that of ecstasy.  The passage in “Nature” where he says “I become a transparent eyeball” is about as near it as he ever came.  This was almost too much for some of his admirers and worshippers.  One of his most ardent and faithful followers, whose gifts as an artist are well known, mounted the eyeball on legs, and with its cornea in front for a countenance and its optic nerve projecting behind as a queue, the spiritual cyclops was shown setting forth on his travels.

Emerson’s reflections in the “transcendental” mood do beyond question sometimes irresistibly suggest the close neighborhood of the sublime to the ridiculous.  But very near that precipitous border line there is a charmed region where, if the statelier growths of philosophy die out and disappear, the flowers of poetry next the very edge of the chasm have a peculiar and mysterious beauty.  “Uriel” is a poem which finds itself perilously near to the gulf of unsounded obscurity, and has, I doubt not, provoked the mirth of profane readers; but read in a lucid moment, it is just obscure enough and just significant enough to give the voltaic thrill which comes from the sudden contacts of the highest imaginative conceptions.

Human personality presented itself to Emerson as a passing phase of universal being.  Born of the Infinite, to the Infinite it was to return.  Sometimes he treats his own personality as interchangeable with objects in nature,—­he would put it off like a garment and clothe himself in the landscape.  Here is a curious extract from “The Adirondacs,” in which the reader need not stop to notice the parallelism with Byron’s—­

  “The sky is changed,—­and such a change!  O night
  And storm and darkness, ye are wondrous strong.”—­

Now Emerson:—­

“And presently the sky is changed; O world!  What pictures and what harmonies are thine!  The clouds are rich and dark, the air serene, So like the soul of me, what if’t were me?”

We find this idea of confused personal identity also in a brief poem printed among the “Translations” in the Appendix to Emerson’s Poems.  These are the last two lines of “The Flute, from Hilali":—­

“Saying, Sweetheart! the old mystery remains,
If I am I; thou, thou, or thou art I?”

The same transfer of personality is hinted in the line of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”: 

              “Be thou, Spirit fierce,
  My spirit!  Be thou me, impetuous one!”

Once more, how fearfully near the abyss of the ridiculous!  A few drops of alcohol bring about a confusion of mind not unlike this poetical metempsychosis.