this time into ever-increasing complexity can there be any doubt in what direction it was moving before historic times? Was not that monotheistic strain purer and stronger then than it was when the torch of history first throws its light upon the scene?

We turn to the Vedic peoples. In a lecture on "The Vedic Religions and Primitive Revelations,"* the author of this article has shown the course taken by them. It corresponded precisely with what might be expected on our theory. The religions hitherto considered know nothing of an individual founder. This is significant. Does it not suggest that in spite of the growing corruption they yet maintained some connection with the original monotheism from which they had branched off, and that the natural course of development had not been disturbed by any great religious founder? It is otherwise with the Iranian. brothers of the Vedic people. They tell of the great religious leader Zoroaster. Certainly he has the marks of an historic character and of great antiquity. It is not necessary to emphasize the lofty character of Zoroaster's deity, Ahura Mazda, the purest conception of God known to the ancient world outside of Hebraism. The purest form of it is found, moreover, in the most ancient Gathas, the oldest songs of this faith. It is generally conceded that these ancient Iranians and the Vedic people sprung from a common ancestry. Why did they separate and why did they not preserve the same religion? The oldest religions of other of these Aryan peoples, the Hellenes, the Italians, and even the Germans, are nearer to the Vedic than to that of the Iranians. The others might easily be simply continuations or natural modifications of the Vedic, but not so the Iranians. All the facts seem to lead to the conclusion that the worshipers of Ahura Mazda aroused by Zoroaster opposed the growing polytheism and under his leadership sought to renew or save the earlier monotheism originally common to all. We have thus seen that all these early historical religions point to an original

*Studies in Comparative Theology, lecture i.

consciousness in man of the unity of God, the same result as appeared from the psychological side of the investigation. Among the Chinese it was preserved in a form perhaps least removed from the original; the Iranians sought to win it back before its complete loss, and those peoples among whom it did degenerate into polytheism preserved it the better the nearer we mount to the primitive ages.

A study of the religion of savages themselves lends its corroboration. In the background of many if not of all of these there is a monotheistic conception, sometimes measurably clear and pure. Lubbock himself quotes Livingstone as saying, "The uncontaminated African believes that the Great Spirit lives above the stars." It is well known that the Eskimos, American Indians, Caribs, believed in a Supreme Spirit, the "Master of Life." Even Tylor says of the races of America, Africa, Polynesia, "High above the doctrine of souls, of divine manes, of local nature-spirits, of the great deities of class and elements, there are to be discerned in savage theology shadowings quaint or majestic of the conception of a Supreme Deity." Though it is directly in the teeth of his own theory, he yet admits that "the degeneration theory may claim such beliefs as mutilated and perverted remnants of higher religions, in some instances, no doubt with justice." Waitz, in summing up all that can be gathered of the religion of the negroes, says that from north to south of Africa they worship a supreme God in addition to their numberless fetiches. Andrew Lang in his Making of Religion gives powerful support to the contention of this paper. His chapter on High Gods of Low Races is especially suggestive.

Thus the facts of psychology, history, and Scripture seem to point to the same conclusion. The farther we go back into that primitive time the narrower becomes the circle of the peoples, until at last we reach the one undivided race who had the religion least removed from the pure intuitive faith of the as yet unfallen pair. That there was some such original unity of the race is taught by comparative philology,

and all the evidence of ethnology tends to the conclusion that mankind spread from some single center and presumably from a single pair. Even Haeckel, Peschel, and Caspari hold with Genesis to the monogenesis of the human race and go so far as to place their imaginary "Lemuria" just near one of the traditional sites of Eden. Drummond seems to assume as much when he says, "Progress can only start by one or two individuals shooting ahead of their species, or by their species being shut off from them;" and Romanes lays stress on the necessity of isolation. Then these isolated ones may well have been Adam and Eve. In face of all the facts, the old Scripture account is not only possible, but in the highest degree reasonable. It better accounts for all the phenomena than any of the hypotheses, and the farther theorists get away from it the more numerous the contradictions in which they are involved.

Ges. H. Trever

ART. X.-EMERSON AS A POET.

THAT Emerson was a true poet of remarkable power cannot be questioned. But whether we may venture to call him a great poet is doubtful. For greatness in this field is usually considered to require some qualities in which he did not excel. To make great poetry there must be something besides great thought. For poetry is, in all cases and at every point, the language of emotion; and emotion, naturally, by a sort of inward necessity, takes on metrical form. Hence the form in poetry acquires an importance not pertaining to it in any other kind of literature; and if the form be found essentially faulty it is a defect that no excellence in other directions can entirely make good. And this is the trouble with much of Emerson's poetry. He had no ear for music. He could not sing. James Russell Lowell remarks in one of his letters: "Emerson was absolutely insensitive to the harmony of verse. It was there he failed. He confessed to me once his inability to apprehend the value of accent in verse. He could not see the difference between a good verse and a bad one." Oliver Wendell Holmes also, noting the desperate work which Emerson sometimes makes with rhyme and rhythm, putting, for instance, "bear" to rhyme with "woodpecker," "feeble” with "people," and "date" with "Ararat," points out how simple a change would often greatly improve the flow of his lines. In "The Adirondacks," for example, there is this line, which is baldest prose, "At morn or noon the guide rows bareheaded," the flat statement of a most unpoetic fact. Not much emotion could be gotten out of it, or into it, anyway, but anybody with the smallest ear for rhythm would have improved the form by saying, "At morn or noon bareheaded rows the guide." Emerson's gross carelessness, then, as a versifier and rhymer, his frequent utter lack of smooth finish and polish, the irregular, unconventional style so often. adopted, the crudity, sometimes bordering on juvenility, of many expressions, detracts greatly from his standing as a

poet. His verse so often jars on the sensitive ear, shows such decided lack of nice perception in the harmonies and discords of word arrangement, that the defect cannot be overlooked. But when we have given due weight to this side of the matter, when we have properly remembered his failings as an artist, we must also bear in mind, on the other hand, that, as Dr. William T. Harris says, "No other poet since Shakespeare has been endowed with so sustained and clear an insight into the transcendency of mind in the visible world. In the internal form of poetry he has no superior, though he is deficient in means of expression." If he seems to despise or ignore too frequently conformity to the ordinary laws of poetic construction, there is at least a compensation in the fact that we so often find in his verse an untamed freedom and freshness, as of the wild woods, that seems peculiarly in place, and rarely well fitted to the rugged character of his thought. He was so far removed from the jingle of popular poetry that he never can become a favorite with the general public; his audience will always be small, but it will certainly be of high quality, "fit though few." He was a seer. He saw beauty everywhere, and knew how to clothe the common aspects of life with the colors of his imagination. He had a depth of spiritual experience and a subtlety of spiritual insight very rare, if indeed it be not unique, among our American authors. E. P. Whipple affirms that "while, as a poet, he often takes strange liberties with the established laws of rhyme and rhythm, he still contrives to pour through his verse a flood and rush of inspiration not often perceptible in the axiomatic sentences of his most splendid prose. In his verse he gives free, joyous, exulting expression to all the audacities of his thinking and feeling." "Whoever would understand him," says Mr. George W. Cooke, "must know his poetry thoroughly, for there alone has he expressed the fullness of his thought, and the innermost of his mind and heart." "When he wished to speak with happy terseness," remarks Professor C. F. Richardson, "with unusual exaltation, with special depth of meaning, with the uttermost intensity of conviction,