They swathed their too much power.
‘Hamatreya,’ the exquisite ‘Rhodora,’ and the musical allegory ‘Two Rivers’ are important as showing the part played by Nature in Emerson’s verse.
Certain poems repeat (or anticipate) the ideas of the essays. ‘Brahma,’ for example, is an incomparable setting of the doctrine of the universal soul or ground of all things:—
Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
‘The Sphinx’ announces, in a sphinx-like manner it must be acknowledged, though with rare beauty in individual lines, the doctrine of man’s relation to all existences, comprehending one phase of which man has the key to the whole. ‘Uriel’ is a declaration of the poet’s faith in good out of evil. ‘The Problem’ teaches the imminence of the Infinite:—
The hand that rounded Peter’s dome
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome