unseen friend, John Sterling, "I am naturally keenly susceptible to the pleasures of rhythm, and cannot believe but one day I shall attain to that splendid dialect, so ardent is my wish; and these wishes, I suppose, are ever only the buds of power; but up to this hour I have never had a true success in such attempts." With an eager patience he waited his appointed hour when his expression should be liberated, for the message came to him listening; "for poetry," he said, "was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse, and substitute something of our own and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of Nations." He saw the stream of Nature and Spirit always flowing, and he told his friend. Dr. Bartol," The miller, like the poet, is a lazy man, setting his wheel in the Stream;" and added, "But his watching is work."

Dr. Holmes, in the last years of his life,

studied his friend's poems and tried him by his own test (though he by no means admits this as the only one):

"Shall we rank Emerson among the great poets or not?

"The great poets are judged by the frame of mind which they induce; and to them, of all men, the severest criticism is due.'

"These are Emerson's words in the Preface to Parnassus. His own poems will stand the test as well as any in the language."

The case is not closed. In this volume the course of the Muse, as Emerson tells it, is pursued with regard to his own poems.

I hang my verses in the wind,

Time and tide their faults will find.

March 12, 1904.

EDWARD W. EMERSON.