," should have stood first in
order. This ranks among the finest of Emerson's poems. All his earlier
verse has a certain freshness which belongs to the first outburst
of song in a poetic nature. "Each and All," "The Humble-Bee," "The
Snow-Storm," should be read before "Uriel," "The World-Soul," or
"Mithridates." "Monadnoc" will be a good test of the reader's taste for
Emerson's poetry, and after this "Woodnotes."

In studying his poems we must not overlook the delicacy of many of their
descriptive portions. If in the flights of his imagination he is
like the strong-winged bird of passage, in his exquisite choice of
descriptive epithets he reminds me of the _tenui-rostrals._ His subtle
selective instinct penetrates the vocabulary for the one word he wants,
as the long, slender bill of those birds dives deep into the flower for
its drop of honey. Here is a passage showing admirably the two different
conditions: wings closed and the selective instinct picking out its
descriptive expressions; then suddenly wings flashing open and the
imagination in the firmament, where it is always at home. Follow the
pitiful inventory of insignificances of the forlorn being he describes
with a pathetic humor more likely to bring a sigh than a smile, and then
mark the grand hyperbole of the last two lines. The passage is from the
poem called "Destiny":--

"Alas! that one is born in blight,
Victim of perpetual slight:
When thou lookest on his face,
Thy heart saith 'Brother, go thy ways!
None shall ask thee what thou doest,
Or care a rush for what thou knowest.
Or listen when thou repliest,
Or remember where thou liest,
Or how thy supper is sodden;'
And another is born
To make the sun forgotten."

Of all Emerson's poems the "Concord Hymn" is the most nearly complete
and faultless,--but it is not distinctively Emersonian. It is such a
poem as Collins might have written,--it has the very movement and
melody of the "Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson," and of the "Dirge in
Cymbeline," with the same sweetness and tenderness of feeling. Its one
conspicuous line,

"And fired the shot heard round the world,"

must not take to itself all the praise deserved by this perfect little
poem, a model for all of its kind. Compact, expressive, serene, solemn,
musical, in four brief stanzas it tells the story of the past, records
the commemorative act of the passing day, and invokes the higher Power
that governs the future to pr