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

So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight,
With cheerful grace and amiable sight.
For, of the soul, the body form doth take,
For soul is form, and doth the body make."

Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical
speculation, but in a holy place, and should go very warily and
reverently. We stand before the secret of the world, there where
Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into Variety.

The Universe is the externisation of the soul. Wherever the
life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is
sensual, and therefore superficial. The earth, and the heavenly
bodies, physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were
self-existent; but these are the retinue of that Being we have. "The
mighty heaven," said Proclus, "exhibits, in its transfigurations,
clear images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions; being moved
in conjunction with the unapparent periods of intellectual natures."
Therefore, science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the
man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of
science is an index of our self-knowledge. Since everything in
nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and
dark, it is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet
active.

No wonder, then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover over
them with a religious regard. The beauty of the fable proves the
importance of the sense; to the poet, and to all others; or, if you
please, every man is so far a poet as to be susceptible of these
enchantments of nature: for all men have the thoughts whereof the
universe is the celebration. I find that the fascination resides in
the symbol. Who loves nature? Who does not? Is it only poets, and
men of leisure and cultivation, who live with her? No; but also
hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers, though they express their
affection in their choice of life, and not in their choice of words.
The writer wonders what the coachman or the hunter values in riding,
in horses, and dogs. It is not superficial qualities. When you talk
with him, he holds these at as slight a rate as you. His worship is
sympathetic; he has no definitions, but he is commanded in nature, by
the living power which he feels to be there present. No imitation,
or playing of these things, would content him; he loves the earnest
of the northwind, of rain, of stone, and wood, and iron. A beauty
not explicable, is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end
of. It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the supernatural,
body overflowed by life, which he worships, with coarse, but sincere
rites.

The inwardness, and mystery, of this attachment, drives men of
every class to the use of emblems. The schools of poets, and