There is a Spartan-like severity in this, but so was Dante very severe. It was his mission to purify the moral sense of his countrymen in an age when the Church no longer encouraged virtue; and Emerson no less vigorously opposed the rank materialism of America in a period of exceptional prosperity. The next succeeding lines are not exactly Dantean, but they are among Emerson's finest, and worthy of any great poet. The "Pine Tree" says: "Heed the old oracles, Ponder my spells; Song wakes in my pinnacles When the wind swells. Soundeth the prophetic wind, The shadows shake on the rock behind, And the countless leaves of the pine are strings Tuned to the lay the wood-god sings." Again we are reminded of Dante in the opening passages of "Voluntaries": "Low and mournful be the strain, Haughty thought be far from me; Where a captive lies in pain Moaning by the tropic sea. Sole estate his sire bequeathed-- Hapless sire to hapless son-- Was the wailing song he breathed, And his chain when life was done." It is still more difficult to compare Emerson with Shakespeare, for the one was Puritan with a strong classic tendency, and the other anti- Puritan with a strong romantic tendency; but allowing for this and for Shakespeare's universality, it may be affirmed that there are few passages in King Henry IV. and Henry V. which take a higher rank than Emerson's description of Cromwell: "He works, plots, fights 'mid rude affairs, With squires, knights, kings his strength compares; Till late he learned through doubt and fear, Broad England harbored not his peer: Unwilling still the last to own, The genius on his cloudy throne." Emerson learned a large proportion of his wisdom from Goethe, as he frequently confessed, but where in Goethe's poetry will you find a quatrain of more penetrating beauty or wider significance than this from "Woodnotes": "Thou canst not wave thy staff in air Nor dip thy paddle in the lake, But it carves the bow of beauty there, And ripples in rhyme the oar forsake." Or this one from the "Building of the House"--considered metaphorically as the life structure of man: "She lays her beams in music, In music every one, To the cadence of the whirling world Which dances round the sun." There is a flash as of heaven's own lightning in some of his verses, and his name has become a spell to conjure with. THE HAWTHORNE CENTENNIAL HAWTHORNE AS ART CRITIC