oriental side of Emerson's nature delighted itself in these narcotic
dreams, born in the land of the poppy and of hashish. They lend a
peculiar charm to his poems, but it is not worth while to try to
construct a philosophy out of them. The knowledge, if knowledge it be,
of the mystic is not transmissible. It is not cumulative; it begins and
ends with the solitary dreamer, and the next who follows him has to
build his own cloud-castle as if it were the first aerial edifice that a
human soul had ever constructed.

Some passages of "Nature," "The Over-Soul," "The Sphinx," "Uriel,"
illustrate sufficiently this mood of spiritual exaltation. Emerson's
calm temperament never allowed it to reach the condition he sometimes
refers to,--that of ecstasy. The passage in "Nature" where he says "I
become a transparent eyeball" is about as near it as he ever came. This
was almost too much for some of his admirers and worshippers. One of his
most ardent and faithful followers, whose gifts as an artist are well
known, mounted the eyeball on legs, and with its cornea in front for
a countenance and its optic nerve projecting behind as a queue, the
spiritual cyclops was shown setting forth on his travels.

Emerson's reflections in the "transcendental" mood do beyond question
sometimes irresistibly suggest the close neighborhood of the sublime to
the ridiculous. But very near that precipitous border line there is a
charmed region where, if the statelier growths of philosophy die out and
disappear, the flowers of poetry next the very edge of the chasm have
a peculiar and mysterious beauty. "Uriel" is a poem which finds itself
perilously near to the gulf of unsounded obscurity, and has, I doubt
not, provoked the mirth of profane readers; but read in a lucid moment,
it is just obscure enough and just significant enough to give the
voltaic thrill which comes from the sudden contacts of the highest
imaginative conceptions.

Human personality presented itself to Emerson as a passing phase of
universal being. Born of the Infinite, to the Infinite it was to return.
Sometimes he treats his own personality as interchangeable with objects
in nature,--he would put it off like a garment and clothe himself in the
landscape. Here is a curious extract from "The Adirondacs," in which the
reader need not stop to notice the parallelism with Byron's--

"The sky is changed,--and such a change! O night
And storm and darkness, ye are wondrous strong."--