"Emerson, Ralph W. - Essays 2nd Series" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

word ever spoken, and the phrase will be the fittest, most musical,
and the unerring voice of the world for that time.

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a
poet is the principal event in chronology. Man, never so often
deceived, still watches for the arrival of a brother who can hold him
steady to a truth, until he has made it his own. With what joy I
begin to read a poem, which I confide in as an inspiration! And now
my chains are to be broken; I shall mount above these clouds and
opaque airs in which I live, -- opaque, though they seem transparent,
-- and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my
relations. That will reconcile me to life, and renovate nature, to
see trifles animated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing.
Life will no more be a noise; now I shall see men and women, and know
the signs by which they may be discerned from fools and satans. This
day shall be better than my birth-day: then I became an animal: now I
am invited into the science of the real. Such is the hope, but the
fruition is postponed. Oftener it falls, that this winged man, who
will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into the clouds, then leaps
and frisks about with me from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he
is bound heavenward; and I, being myself a novice, am slow in
perceiving that he does not know the way into the heavens, and is
merely bent that I should admire his skill to rise, like a fowl or a
flying fish, a little way from the ground or the water; but the
all-piercing, all-feeding, and ocular air of heaven, that man shall
never inhabit. I tumble down again soon into my old nooks, and lead
the life of exaggerations as before, and have lost my faith in the
possibility of any guide who can lead me thither where I would be.

But leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new hope,
observe how nature, by worthier impulses, has ensured the poet's
fidelity to his office of announcement and affirming, namely, by the
beauty of things, which becomes a new, and higher beauty, when
expressed. Nature offers all her creatures to him as a
picture-language. Being used as a type, a second wonderful value
appears in the object, far better than its old value, as the
carpenter's stretched cord, if you hold your ear close enough, is
musical in the breeze. "Things more excellent than every image,"
says Jamblichus, "are expressed through images." Things admit of
being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and
in every part. Every line we can draw in the sand, has expression;
and there is no body without its spirit or genius. All form is an
effect of character; all condition, of the quality of the life; all
harmony, of health; (and, for this reason, a perception of beauty
should be sympathetic, or proper only to the good.) The beautiful
rests on the foundations of the necessary. The soul makes the body,
as the wise Spenser teaches: --

"So every spirit, as it is most pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,