"'Twas one of the charmed days When the genius of God doth flow; The wind may alter twenty ways, A tempest cannot blow; It may blow north, it still is warm; Or south, it still is clear; Or east, it smells like a clover farm; Or west, no thunder fear." All who love nature or who wish to become interested in her should read at least his _Woodnotes_, _The Humble Bee_, _The Rhodora_, _Each and All_, _The Snow Storm,_ and _To Ellen at the South_. Some of his philosophy may be found in poems like _The Problem_ (1839), _The Sphinx_ (1841), and _Brahma_ (1857). The immanence of God in everything, in the sculptor's hand, for instance, is well expressed in _The Problem_:-- "The hand that rounded Peter's dome And groined the aisles of Christian Rome Wrought in a sad sincerity; Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew;-- The conscious stone to beauty grew." _The Sphinx_ thus expresses one of Emerson's favorite thoughts:-- "To vision profounder, Man's spirit must dive," and concludes with the Sphinx's thought-provoking statement:- "Who telleth one of my meanings, Is master of all I am." This line in _Brahma_:-- "I am the doubter and the doubt," shows his belief in the unity of all things, his conviction that all existence and action result from one underlying force. His own personal philosophy, that which actuated him in dealing with his fellow-men, is expressed in the following lines, which are worthy a place in the active memory of every American:-- "Life is too short to waste In critic peep or cynic bark, Quarrel or reprimand: 'Twill soon be dark." While we are enjoying his poetry, we feel its limitations. Having slight ear for music, he often wrote halting lines. Sometimes his poetic flight is marked by too sudden a descent, but we shall often find in his verse rare jewels, such as:-- "When Duty whispers low, '_Thou must_,' The youth replies, '_I can._'" These lines seemed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, the moment he saw them, as if they had been "carved on marble for a thousand years." Emerson's poetry does not pulsate with warm human feeling, but it "follows the shining trail of the ethereal," the ideal, and the eternal. His prose overshadows his poetry, but no one without natural poetical ability of a high order could have written the lines:-- "O tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire," or even have seen "The frolic architecture of the snow." GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.--The central aim of Emerson's writing is moral development. He is America's greatest ethical teacher. He thus voices his fixed belief:-- "A breath of will blows eternally through the universe of souls in the direction of the Right and Necessary." This belief gives rise to his remarkable optimism for the future, to his conviction that evil is but a stepping stone to good.