present. "There are times when the cawing of a crow, a weed, a
snowflake, a boy's willow whistle, or a farmer planting in his field is
more suggestive to the mind than the Yosemite gorge or the Vatican would
be in another hour. In like mood, an old verse, or certain words, gleam
with rare significance." At the close of his essay on History he is
trying to make us feel that all history, in so far as we can know it, is
within ourselves, and is in a certain sense autobiography. He is
speaking of the Romans, and he suddenly pretends to see a lizard on the
wall, and proceeds to wonder what the lizard has to do with the Romans.
For this he has been quite properly laughed at by Dr. Holmes, because he
has resorted to an artifice and has failed to create an illusion.
Indeed, Dr. Holmes is somewhere so irreverent as to remark that a gill
of alcohol will bring on a psychical state very similar to that
suggested by Emerson; and Dr. Holmes is accurately happy in his jest,
because alcohol does dislocate the attention in a thoroughly mystical
manner.

There is throughout Emerson's poetry, as throughout all of the New
England poetry, too much thought, too much argument. Some of his verse
gives the reader a very curious and subtle impression that the lines are
a translation. This is because he is closely following a thesis. Indeed,
the lines are a translation. They were thought first, and poetry
afterwards. Read off his poetry, and you see through the scheme of it at
once. Read his prose, and you will be put to it to make out the
connection of ideas. The reason is that in the poetry the sequence is
intellectual, in the prose the sequence is emotional. It is no mere
epigram to say that his poetry is governed by the ordinary laws of prose
writing, and his prose by the laws of poetry.

The lines entitled Days have a dramatic vigor, a mystery, and a music