The fact is that he wrote mainly for his own time, and was bound to have but a temporary reward. This is not saying that the reward was not worth while. His interpretations of Spenser, of Dante, of Milton, of the elder dramatists, sent to those poets many a reader who would not otherwise have gone; for America, he opened the road in the study of Chaucer; and his own “Vision of Sir Launfal” has unlocked many a hard heart to divine influences. When he wrote in dialect, as in the “Biglow Papers,” he was manifestly writing for a time; but in their time the second series did more to justify the Northern cause than almost any other publication that could be mentioned, Whittier’s poems not excepted. It may be thought that his wonderful command of dialect, contrasted with a less perfect and less instinctive success in any higher medium, marks him as above all else a satiric poet. When he was once sitting for his portrait, he so denominated himself, speaking generally--“a bored satiric poet.” Yet were we to name Lowell the greatest of all American satirists, his urgent poems of patriotism--“The Washers of the Shroud,” the “Commemoration Ode”--his “Vision of Sir Launfal,” and “The Cathedral” would immediately proclaim him something greater than any satiric poet could be. Last of all, nobler than the sum of his writings was the work which he effected in bringing together his native land and the mother country, England, in a bond of sympathy unknown since their separation.
_Ralph Waldo Emerson._--Emerson usually passes for a philosophical mystic and lay preacher. He deemed himself more of a poet than anything else, for he always hoped to attain perfect utterance in rhythmical language. Yet the fact that he wrote much more prose, however imaginative, than verse, has relegated the main treatment of him to another section of this volume. Such an arrangement, of course, is grounded in uncritical custom, not in reason.