WAS EMERSON COLD?

Otago Witness, Issue 1652, 21 July 1883, Page 26

WAS EMERSON COLD?

(American Paper,)

I3ight generations of typical New England •clergymen sent down to him their habit of reticence, of suppressed emotion, and, if one may say^ so, of natural uunaturalness. The ice that incrusied him had been forming since the' winter oi 1620. Is it venturesome to try to sound beneath it? Emerson had the temperament of a p.>et with the mind of a philodophprf; His poetry— and it is to his poetry we BwJst look to answer our question— is rarified D.y.Ms philosophy, and his philosophy is fired by'unemng poetic intuition. ', ' Some one aaid well of him a few year 3 ago, "He is a mystic rather than a sceptic." A tnyetio cannot be cold, for the very exhalations fcf thought into the glowing vapour of mysticism implies a central fire. In studying him we must remember that habitual reserve and the interplay of thought with emotion hold him quiet till he has passed the first and second stages jof emotional experience, so we can get from hxtn no outcry, no ,' , , " Tears and laughter for all time," *u> (from Shakespeare — the worse, perhaps, for him and for us. But were the tears and laughter ever there ? One has only to be able to read backward a little way to answer. „ , To beeold were to be, for example, like Pope, •whose lines, rolling on in smooth succession, giv« no hint of pain different from that of wSUnded vanity or ambition, no sign of sensibility to the mysterious forces that are not bound up in books ; such as the currents of the air and light, the breath of flowers, or the indescribable mental and spiritual quickening ,that results from fit companionship. . Emerson's poetry is to his prose what the blossom of the delicate climbing honeysuckle is to the bright red and yellow flowers of the coarser varieties, which, at the same season, jmake so many trellises gay. Its faintly-tinted and hardly-parting petals open slowly, surmised while they look at you from their shy colour into a golden hue ; yet this alone of all jfcl^e family has a soul. To the one who passes iiear it when the dew falls and the moon is up, it breathes out what all the glare of daylight «ould never reveal in the others. Emerson had ,the kinship with nature which made it possible ■for Mm to write "The Snow Storm" and " May •T)ay," and to say in one mood : f " A woodland walk, A quest of rivor grapes, a mocUag- thrush, A wild rose or rock-living columbine Salve my worst wounds." He would be not cold, but cool as Words.worth, if that mood had been constant; but turn a few pages and see what we haye — a poem kindled with white heat. Its very concentration carries a convincing intensity, while we might wish it had expanded to the length of '"In Memoriam," or had been wreathed with all tho " sad embroidery " of Lycidas : " A ruddy drop of manly blood The burging sea outweighs ; The world uncertain comes and goes, The lover, rooted, Btays. I fancied he was fled, And after many a year Glowed unexhausted kindliness Like daily sunrise there. * O friend,' my bosom said, : ' Through thee alone the sky ia arched, 1 Through thee the rose'is red ; ' ,• ' All things through thee take nobler form And look beyond the earth ; 0 • . Ihe mill rotmd of our fate appears A sun-path in thy worth. ( , Me, too, thy nobleness haa taught f ■ To master my despair ; ' ' The fountains of my hidden life '. ' Are through thy friendship fair.' " ' In '"The Nun's Aspiration" them is profound insight, the insight of the heart that ideteotß, in watching her share in life and .time, V > " How drear the patt she held m one, How lame the other limped away." -„,It is true Tennyson's " St. Agnes " is read a hundred times for every glance that is cast on ■ this, Tennyson's easy music catches the ear, .and its voice is single and simple, the voice of ; a sweet song, while Emerson's Nun speaks -' words that would fit Beethoven's music. Artistically, it is, perhaps, a fault that such a poem .ahould demand such close consideration ; but j , the question is not of Emerson as an artist, ,and once absorbed, we find the spirit of the poem adequate to the deepest despair and the highest hope. Is it not De Quincey who says, . " Absolute despair is dumb ?" and if a painter t would give us the loneliest sea, he makes a gray -waste of water, with only a single rock over jwhich the waves can break, or a dismantled jjship lighted only by the afterglow of sunset, .saying most by uttering least. ,v", v " A cold man is never stirred by enthusiasm. , He watches critically while troops muster, and 1 sees only through half-lights the beacons that .draw mgh-souled men to glorious loss. He calculates motives while others lay down life. ,But if one would know of what stuff Emerson's soul was made, he can learn from his war poem, " Voluntaries." Not Lowell and Whit,tier and Holmes and Mrs Howe have with " their combined voices spoken the full meaning ( of 1862. Phases of its feeling they caught, . and something of its scope, but its awful in- , tensity of passion . and principle, the tremen- , dous surge that rolled out from love of country, from long-baffled indignation against wrong, world-wide pity and forelooking hope — a surge that swept under in its tide hearts and homes trained by centuries of loyalty to an illimitable .tenderness — all this no American less great . than Emerson has found a musical chord grand \ enough to fit. Stall, perception of the secrets that " all can •'..look at and few can see," sympathy with the < tragic.element in lives that die and make no , sign, • and even enthusiasm for great causes, . leave something lacking to our conception of ' genuine warmth of heart. We must be told , at last how the man can love and grieve in , those relations that are common to all— where the philosopher and the day-labourer meet undistinguished. There are two poems, " The ,' Dirge" and "Threnody" that answer us at this point. " The Dirge "is a pensive summer ' afternoon Memory, as he recalls, in his walk , hy the Concord River, the brothers he had lost. He sayß : " I touch this flower of silken leaf Which once my childhood ki-cw ; Its soft leaves wound me with a grief ' Whose balsam never grew." Then the "pine-warbler," singing to him, ' Bays : " Go, lonely man ! They loved thee from their birth ; Their hands were pure and pure their faith. There are no such hearts on earth ; You cannot unlock your heart— The key is gone with them— The silent organ loudest chants Tho master's requiem." " Threnody " is hia wail over the beautiful ' boy, the little Waldo, whom Margaret Fuller 'and all who saw him pronounced the most; • gifted and lovable child they had ever known. In Threnody "it is not Emerson, the great , thinker of his time and of his country, who , speaks, but Emerson the father, as he hungrily watches from his study window not to miss one innocent and lovely look of the boy on his way to Wihool. No one can ever have loved a ' child wqo cfe'n read with undimmed eyes about

the painted sled and the kennel and the snowtower, " the ominous hole dug in the sand," "And every inch of garden gr und Paced by the bleated feet around."

Then there comes the morning, when everything else, all birds and common things could wake to life, but the boy was gone, and the father, " grown early old with grief," reaches out from the vacancy, saying ; " The eager fate which curried thoa Took the largest part of me, For this losing is true dying."

No quotation can give the pathos of the poem - the mourning for the world's loss, as well as his own, rising gradually to those heights where lame reason never carried any man — and closing with an organ tone of sublime faith " of suffering born :" " What ia excellent, As God lives, is permanent ; Hearts are duat - hearts' love 3 remain ; Heart's love shall meet thee again. Do we need further search, or ever to ask again, Was Emerson cold ? Elizabeth T. Spring.