ultant scorn
of restraint and convention. All sense of sylvan health and beauty is
uttered when this Gypsy says,--

"The wild air bloweth in our lungs,
The keen stars twinkle in our eyes,
The birds gave us our wily tongues,
The panther in our dances flies."

"Terminus" has a wonderful didactic charm, and must be valued as one of
the noblest introspective poems in the language. The poet touches his
reader by his acceptance of fate and age, and his serene trust of the
future, and yet is not moved by his own pathos.

We do not regard the poem "The Adirondacks" as of great absolute or
relative value. It is one of the prosiest in the book, and for a
professedly out-of-doors poem has too much of the study in it. Let us
confess also that we have not yet found pleasure in "The Elements," and
that we do not expect to live long enough to enjoy some of them.
"Quatrains" have much the same forbidding qualities, and have chiefly
interested us in the comparison they suggest with the translations from
the Persian: it is curious to find cold Concord and warm Ispahan in the
same latitude. Others of the briefer poems have delighted us. "Rubies,"
for instance, is full of exquisite lights and hues, thoughts and
feelings; and "The Test" is from the heart of the severe wisdom without
which art is not. Everywhere the poet's felicity of expression appears;
a fortunate touch transfuses some dark enigma with color; the riddles
are made to shine when most impenetrable; the puzzles are all
constructed of gold and ivory and precious stones.

Mr. Emerson's intellectual characteristics and methods are so known that
it is scarcely necessary to hint that this is not a book for instant
absorption into any reader's mind. It shall happen with many, we fancy,
that they find themselves ready for only two or three things in it, and
that they must come to it in widely varying moods for all it has to
give. No greater wrong could be done to the poet than to go through his
book running, and he would be apt to revenge himself upon the impatient
reader by leaving him all the labor involved in such a course, and no
reward at the end for his pains.

But the case is not a probable one. People either read Mr. Emerson
patiently and earnestly, or they do not read him at all. In this earnest
nation he enjoys a far greater popularity than criticism would have
augured for one so unflattering to the impulses that have heretofore and
elsewhere made rea