In rare souls like Emerson, the fruit of extreme culture, it is inevitable that at least some of the heat rays should be lost, and we miss them especially when we contrast him with the elder masters.  The elder masters did not seem to get rid of the coarse or vulgar in human life, but royally accepted it, and struck their roots into it, and drew from it sustenance and power:  but there is an ever-present suspicion that Emerson prefers the saints to the sinners; prefers the prophets and seers to Homer, Shakespeare, and Dante.  Indeed, it is to be distinctly stated and emphasized, that Emerson is essentially a priest, and that the key to all he has said and written is to be found in the fact that his point of view is not that of the acceptor, the creator,—­Shakespeare’s point of view,—­but that of the refiner and selector, the priest’s point of view.  He described his own state rather than that of mankind when he said, “The human mind stands ever in perplexity, demanding intellect, demanding sanctity, impatient equally of each without the other.”

Much surprise has been expressed in literary circles in this country that Emerson has not followed up his first off-hand indorsement of Walt Whitman with fuller and more deliberate approval of that poet, but has rather taken the opposite tack.  But the wonder is that he should have been carried off his feet at all in the manner he was; and it must have been no ordinary breeze that did it.  Emerson shares with his contemporaries the vast preponderance of the critical and discerning intellect over the fervid, manly qualities and faith.  His power of statement is enormous; his scope of being is not enormous.  The prayer he uttered many years ago for a poet of the modern, one who could see in the gigantic materialism of the times the carnival of the same deities we so much admire in Greece and Rome, seems to many to have even been explicitly answered in Whitman; but Emerson is balked by the cloud of materials, the din and dust of action, and the moving armies, in which the god comes enveloped.

But Emerson has his difficulties with all the poets.  Homer is too literal, Milton too literary, and there is too much of the whooping savage in Whitman.  He seems to think the real poet is yet to appear; a poet on new terms, the reconciler, the poet-priest,—­one who shall unite the whiteness and purity of the saint with the power and unction of the sinner; one who shall bridge the chasm between Shakespeare and St. John.  For when our Emerson gets on his highest horse, which he does only on two or three occasions, he finds Shakespeare only a half man, and that it would take Plato and Manu and Moses and Jesus to complete him.  Shakespeare, he says, rested with the symbol, with the festal beauty of the world, and did not take the final step, and explore the essence of things, and ask, “Whence?  What? and Whither?” He was not wise for himself; he did not lead a beautiful, saintly life, but ate, and drank, and reveled, and