Jasper County Democrat, Volume 4, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 June 1901 — EMERSON AND ALDRICH. [ARTICLE]

EMERSON AND ALDRICH.

Declared by One Literary Critic to Be Our Best Examples. In Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, America has seen all her potential forceof national spirit a ndcharm of national grace, says J. 1). lAiskam, in the Atlantic. If in. the one philosophy slipped into mysticism, inspired brevity in curtness, intensity of conviction into dogmatism; if his exquisite facility has sometimes It'd the other into work ifiore remarkable for that quality than for inspiration, they yet remain* the most perfect types, the most valuable examples, and the ,-afest eriterions of the American genius; and it is their influence on our most, valuable recent verse, direct or implied, that subsequent illustration unaided by much analysis or comment may be trusted to bring out. . . . Welook for oneon whom, because of greater national maturity, the national spirit shall have descended with a potency yet unknown, because he will be in no sense a pioneer, and his inheritance of characteristic force will be cumulative. And his task will have become so trained that the crudities, hitherto almost always inseparable from the strongest poetic material of the country, will be as impossible for him in the treatment of the elemental conceptions as they have been for Aldrich in his treatment of those most exquisite cameos of verse.