The excellence of the book is not so much in its representations of the representative men who form its subjects, as in the representation of Mr. Emerson himself; and we doubt if, in all literature, there are revealed many individualities so peculiar, and so powerful in its peculiarity, as the individuality stamped upon every page of the present volume. We would not presume, in our limits, to attempt an analysis of an intellect so curiously complex as Mr. Emerson’s—with traits which strike us as a Parthian’s arrows, shot while he is flying, and which both provoke and defy the pursuit of criticism; but we will extract instead, a few of the beautiful and brilliant sentences which are inserted, like gems, in almost every lecture, and in each of which some sparkle of the writer’s quality appears. The lecture on Goethe is a perfect diamond necklace, shooting out light in every direction, with some flashes that illumine, for the instant, labyrinths of thought which darkness is considered to hold as exclusively her own.
In speaking of the acting of Shakspeare’s plays, he translates into words an emotion which everyone has felt, but which we never dreamed could be perfectly expressed. “The recitation,” he says, “begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes.” Again, he remarks that Shakspeare is inconceivably wise; all other writers conceivably. “A good reader,” he says, “can, in a sort, nestle into Plato’s brain, and think from thence; but not into Shakspeare’s. We are still out of doors.” Speaking of Montaigne’s use of language, he exclaims, “but these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.” Of Mr. Emerson’s peculiar wit the present volume is full of Examples. Thus he speaks of “the heaven of law, and the pismire of performance under it;” of Plato as having “clapped copyright on the world;” of the possibility, as regards marriage, of dividing the human race into two classes; “those who are out and want to get in, and those who are in and want to get out;” but quotation of small sentences is impertinent, where so many paragraphs are thoroughly pervaded with the quality.
In speaking of Plato’s mind, Mr. Emerson gives us some of his keenest and most characteristic sentences—sentences in which the thought seems to go in straight lines right at the mark, but to lack a comprehension of relations. In Plato, he says, “the freest abandonment is united with the precision of a geometer. His daring imagination gives him the more solid grasp of facts; as the birds of the highest flight have the strongest alar bones.” . . . “His strength,” he says, a few pages after, “is like the momentum of a falling planet; and his discretion, the return of its due and perfect curve.” Perhaps the best passage, however, in the lecture on Plato, is that in which he describes the divine delirium, in which the philosopher rises into the seer. “He believes that poetry, prophecy, and the high insight, are from a wisdom of which man is not master; that the gods never philosophize; but, by a celestial mania, these miracles are accomplished. Horsed on these winged steeds, he sweeps the dim regions, visits worlds which flesh cannot enter; he saw the souls in pain; he hears the doom of the judge; he beholds the penal metempsychosis; the Fates, with the rock and shears; and hears the intoxicating hum of their spindle.”
Sentences, bright and beautiful as these, might be extracted from this volume to such an extent as to bring upon us an action for violating the copyright. For fineness of wit, imagination, observation, satire and sentiment, the book hardly has its equal in American literature; with its positive opinions we have little to do. With respect to these, it may be generally said, that Mr. Emerson is always beneath the surface, and never at the centre.
The Seaside and the Fireside. By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields. 1 vol. 16mo.
We have not space this month to do much more than refer to this beautiful collection of poems, instinct with sentiment and imagination, and with that drapery of beauty over the whole which constitutes the charm equally of Longfellow’s narratives and meditations. The first poem in the volume is “The Building of the Ship,” a worthy counterpart of Schiller’s “Song of the Bell,” and a grand example of the union of the common with the beautiful. We doubt if any of the poet’s longer compositions will equal it in popularity. To this succeed a number of pieces relating to the sea, of which “The Light House,” and “The Fire of Drift Wood,” appear to us the best. The poems “by the fireside,” commence with “Resignation,” an elegy warm from the author’s heart and imagination, and whose exquisite pathos has been felt and acknowledged all over the country. “The Open Window,” and “The Sand of the Desert,” belonging to this portion of the volume, are fine specimens of two processes of Longfellow’s mind—its subtle suggestiveness and its clear pictorial power. A long poem of twenty-seven pages, translated from the Gascon of Jasmin, entitled “The Blind Girl of Castèl-Cuillè,” is a tragedy whose power, sweetness, and pathos the dullest reader cannot resist. We wish that Mr. Longfellow would give us more specimens of this charming poet, as worthily “Englished” as the present.
We think that none of Mr. Longfellow’s volumes will be received with more favor than this, embodying as it does the best qualities of his muse, and leaving little for even the critic to grumble at but the smallness of its bulk.
Old Portraits and Modern Sketches. By John G. Whittier. Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields. 1 vol. 12mo.