Meantime, if anybody arose with a special sensibility or a technical
genius, he was in great straits; not being fed sufficiently by the
world, he was driven in upon his own resources. The three American
writers whose personal endowment was perhaps the finest--Poe,
Hawthorne, and Emerson--had all a certain starved and abstract
quality. They could not retail the genteel tradition; they were too
keen, too perceptive, and too independent for that. But life offered
them little digestible material, nor were they naturally voracious.
They were fastidious, and under the circumstances they were starved.
Emerson, to be sure, fed on books. There was a great catholicity in
his reading; and he showed a fine tact in his comments, and in his way
of appropriating what he read. But he read transcendentally, not
historically, to learn what he himself felt, not what others might
have felt before him. And to feed on books, for a philosopher or a
poet, is still to starve. Books can help him to acquire form, or to
avoid pitfalls; they cannot supply him with substance, if he is to
have any. Therefore the genius of Poe and Hawthorne, and even of
Emerson, was employed on a sort of inner play, or digestion of
vacancy. It was a refined labour, but it was in danger of being
morbid, or tinkling, or self-indulgent.
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