His courage was the talisman that won him admiration, and his earnestness, visible through the veil of arrogance and petty affectations, secured respect. In _Representative Men_, the old Plato-worship illumined by Schelling--_Wissenschaften_--is the key-note, and _English Traits_ is the record of impressions received during the _Sturm und Drang_, or rather 'cloud-compelling' days of the _Dial_ and _Essay_ developments. A volume of _Poems_, published in 1856, recalls the old landmarks. If they are rich in thought, they are also luxuriant in labyrinthine sentences that puzzle even the initiated in the Ziph language. A thought once extricated from a maze of inversion and entangled particles, 'we are in pain To think how to unthink that thought again.' As a poet, Emerson is careless in versification. Like Friar John, of the Funnels, he does not rhyme in crimson. His imagination is too bold to be confined by the petty limits of trochee or iambus. Consequently his pictures, when he condescends to paint, present rather a mass of brilliant coloring than the well-finished detail that we demand in a work of art. We look in vain in his poems for that effort of identity between the conscious and the unconscious activities that Schelling calls the sole privilege of genius. 'The infinite (or perfect) presented as the finite, is Beauty.' Yet the single poem 'Threnody' would establish Emerson's title to a place among the guild of poets. It is classically beautiful and faultless in mechanism. Its flow is that of a river over sands of gold, its solemn monotone broken now and then by _staccato_ plaints, and the tender gold of its shining waters dimmed by dark shadows, as rock beneath or tree above assails the gentle stillness of its onward flow. Only that which comes from the heart goes again to the heart. We find a new and delicious personality, a simple Greek naturalness, in this exquisite dirge that scarcely owns the 'blasphemy of grief,' that are wanted in his sententious instructions and metaphysical wanderings.