Page:Americans (1922).djvu/135

 his supreme moments. It teaches the enormous force of a few words and in proportion to the inspiration checks loquacity." Despite his desire for fresh beginnings in America, he finds it necessary to turn back to the old English writers, "not because they are old, but simply because they wrote well. If we write as well, we may deviate from them and our deviations shall be classical." Every one, it is to be hoped, remembers the little poem called "The Test," in which Emerson challenges his reader to find the "five lines" in his verses which outlasted five hundred. It is a virtue in him, which our present loquacity should some day make esteemed, that he so often anticipates the winnowing of time, as in the firm Landorian carving of the Concord Hymn with its cumulative solemnity, reaching its climax in the breathless pause of the flawless final stanza, before the ultimate foot:

The popular taste in poetry, as is proved by many of the great reputations, is a little waterish. Emerson served "wine of wine." He has been underrated as a poet because he did not understand, or would not practice, dilution. One suspects that he might be reinstated if some student of Japanese verse would display in a wide-margined volume some fifty