The greatest literature is that which is most broadly human, or, in
other words, that which will square best with all philosophies. But
Emerson's genius was interpretative rather than constructive. The poet
dwells in the cheerful world of phenomena. He is most the poet who
realizes most intensely the good and the bad of human life. But
Idealism makes experience shadowy and subordinates action to
contemplation. To it the cities of men, with their "frivolous
populations,"

"are but sailing foam-bells
Along thought's causing stream."

Shakespeare does not forget that the world will one day vanish "like
the baseless fabric of a vision," and that we ourselves are "such stuff
as dreams are made on;" but this is not the mood in which he dwells.
Again: while it is for the philosopher to reduce variety to unity, it
is the poet's task to detect the manifold under uniformity. In the
great creative poets, in Shakespeare and Dante and Goethe, how infinite
the swarm of persons, the multitude of forms! But with Emerson the
type is important, the common element. "In youth we are mad for
persons. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical
nature appearing through them all." "The same--the same!" he exclaims
in his essay on _Plato_. "Friend and foe are of one stuff; the
plowman, the plow, and the furrow are of one stuff." And this is the
thought in _Brahma_:

"They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly I am the wings:
I am the doubter find the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings."