His mystical poems, from the point
of view of such criticism as this, are all alike in that they all seek
to do the same thing. Nor does he always succeed. How does he sometimes
fail in verse to say what he conveys with such everlasting happiness in
prose!
"I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Caesar's hand and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakespeare's strain."
In these lines we have the same thought which appears a few pages later
in prose: "All that Shakespeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy
that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself." He has failed in
the verse because he has thrown a mystical gloss over a thought which
was stronger in its simplicity; because in the verse he states an
abstraction instead of giving an instance. The same failure follows him
sometimes in prose when he is too conscious of his machinery.
Emerson knew that the sense of mystery accompanies the shift of an
absorbed attention to some object which brings the mind back to the
present.
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