"THE JOYS OF BEING A WOMAN" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kirkland Winifred)

We are each launched in life with an elfin shipmate--
set jogging upon earth beside a fairy comrade. When
our ears are clear, he pipes magic music; when our feet
are free he pleads with us to follow him on witching
paths. We cannot often hear, we cannot often follow,
but when we do, we know him for what he is; when we
sail or run or fly with him, we know him for the
gladdest fellow with whom life ever paired us, a
companion rarely glimpsed, but glorious, for he is our
own true Self. Poets and dreamers have sometimes
snared him in a sonnet, but for the most part, for his
waggishness and his wanderings, he demands, not the
strait-jacketing of poetry, but the flexible garment of
prose. It is the shifting subtleties of the essay that
have ever best expressed him.
One man there was in that peopled past, where
friendship's best doors fly open at our knock, who knew
how to catch his elusive Ego and keep it glad even on
ways that led through sordid counting-house and
sadder madhouse; and who knew also, better than any one
since has ever known, how to envisage and investure
that exquisite Self of his, sweet, quaint sprite that
it was, in an essay. Ever since that time those of us
who love essays say, of one possessing special grace,
it is like Elia's, meaning not that it imitates Lamb's

style, the inimitable, but that it reveals, as only the
essay can do, personality.
Of all literary forms the personal essay appears
the most artless, a little boat that sails us into
pleasant havens, without any sound of machinery and
without any chart or compass. To read is as if we
overheard some one chatting with that little
merry-heart, his own particular Ego. We do not stop to
think what childlike simplicities any grown-up must
attain before he can hear that fairy divinity, his own
Self, speak at all, for the only true tongue in which
the Self speaks is joy. Only childlike feet can follow
the feet of fairies. The self-annalist whose essays
warm our hearts with friendship, must be one who sips
the wine of mirth when all alone with his own Self.
Not many such are born, and fewer of them write essays.
The essay is no easy thing. The true mood and the true
manner of it are rare. It is as difficult to write an
essay on purpose as it is to be a person on
purpose, a teasing game and unsatisfactory.
Yet the difficulties of essay-writing are offset by
the delights: for there is nothing so compelling to
expression as chuckle, and that is what the true essay
is, sheer chuckle; it is what we felt and saw that time
the elfin Ego floated in on a sun-mote, and showed us,

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