A field of havoc and war,
Where tyrants great and tyrants small
Might harry the weak and poor?
The best of Emerson’s patriotic poems is the ‘Voluntaries,’ containing the often quoted and perfect lines:—
So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can.
The personal poems are ‘Good-Bye,’ ‘Terminus,’ ‘In Memoriam,’ ‘Dirge,’ and ‘Threnody.’ The last of the group is the poet’s lament for his first-born, the ‘hyacinthine boy’ of five years, who died in 1842. It is hardly worth the while to compare these exquisite verses with some other poem born of intense sorrow with a view to determining whether they are greater, or less. Their wondrous beauty is as palpable as it is unresembling.
Comparisons little befit Emerson the poet. His muse was wayward. Extreme eulogists do him injury by applying to him standards that were none of his. They forget how he said of himself that he was ‘not a poet, but a lover of poetry and poets, and merely serving as a writer, etc., in this empty America before the arrival of poets.’ For the extravagancies of the extremists the tempered admirers find themselves regularly lectured, as if they were children who must have it explained to them that Emerson was not a Keats or a Shelley, or a Hugo.