Arbitrarily limiting ourselves here to his compositions in metre, we find that throughout his life (1803-82), or throughout the years in which he was productive, Emerson was responsible for much more poetry, in the narrower sense, than most of his readers are aware of, and that his poems are as well worth attention as his essays. In his verse, which was written for himself, he is, to be sure, less at home so far as concerns the form, but being less hampered by any regard for an audience, he is more spontaneous in his thought. At the same time, his stock of fundamental ideas and sentiments, however vivid and pure, was pretty much exhausted in his prose, so that, to a considerable extent, he repeated himself when he changed his medium of expression. Moreover, as the hierophant of intellectual independence, he did not come to a practical realisation of the way in which the opulence of the greatest poets and thinkers is related to the wealth and continuity of their reading. Emerson, indeed, read multifariously if not thoroughly; and it is true that his essays are liberal in the use of borrowed matter; the production of an essay on Montaigne might appear to mean little more than throwing together an anthology of excerpts, cemented with Emerson’s own marginal notes. He rarely mastered any single author entire. His insight went by leaps and bounds, and he appropriated what he found congenial, not being pliant enough to enter steadily and long into the thought of another. His prose in general lacks plan. Some of his poems, on the contrary, are more unified, having an organic wholeness which is absent from his longer essays. In an essay, mere continuity of sentiment and preservation of individual style do not constitute an adequate link between the parts. In a lyric poem, such consistency may suffice. Virtually, all of Emerson’s poetry is lyrical and meditative. The technique is seldom smooth, not for want of pains, since it was laboured and continually retouched, but for want of capacity in the artist. The style is apt to be brittle, the cadence is not maintained through passages of any length, and the separate sentences are easily detached from their context. Even so, they are not always clear, but may need commentary and parallel from the “Essays” to explain them. Emerson’s poetry is largely autobiographical and, in no harsh sense, egoistic, a picture of the successive and recurrent states of his own soul. His vision of the universe in each of its parts, his belief in the immanence of God and the educational potency of solitude, and his confidence in the ability of Nature to prepare and suddenly to produce ideal or “representative” men, are ever near the surface. In his descriptions of the external world he is faithful to detail; but as he discovers in each individual thing an intrinsic value transcending the value of its dependence on the whole, he is likely to see the parts without being ready to seize the perspective. Among details his