It is not easy to fancy a writer who holds this altitude toward
"persons" descending to the composition of a novel or a play. Emerson
showed, indeed, a fine power of character-analysis in his _English
Traits_ and _Representative Men_ and in his memoirs of Thoreau and
Margaret Fuller. There is even a sort of dramatic humor in his
portrait of Socrates. But upon the whole he stands midway between
constructive artists, whose instinct it is to tell a story or sing a
song, and philosophers, like Schelling, who give poetic expression to a
system of thought. He belongs to the class of minds of which Sir
Thomas Browne is the best English example. He set a high value upon
Browne, to whose style his own, though far more sententious, bears a
resemblance. Browne's saying, for example, "All things are artificial,
for nature is the art of God," sounds like Emerson, whose workmanship,
for the rest, in his prose essays was exceedingly fine and close. He
was not afraid to be homely and racy in expressing thought of the
highest spirituality. "Hitch your wagon to a star" is a good instance
of his favorite manner.

Emerson's verse often seems careless in technique. Most of his pieces
are scrappy and have the air of runic rimes, or little oracular
"voicings"--as they say at Concord--in rhythmic shape, of single
thoughts on "Worship," "Character," "Heroism," "Art," "Politics,"
"Culture," etc. The content is the important thing, and the form is
too frequently awkward or bald. Sometimes, indeed, in the
clear-obscure of Emerson's poetry the deep wisdom of the thought finds
its most natural expression in the imaginative simplicity of the
language. But though this artlessness in him became too frequently in
his imitators, like Thoreau and Ellery Channing, an obtruded
simplicity, among his own poems are many that leave nothing to be