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

ESSAYS
_Second Series_
by Ralph Waldo Emerson


THE POET


A moody child and wildly wise
Pursued the game with joyful eyes,
Which chose, like meteors, their way,
And rived the dark with private ray:
They overleapt the horizon's edge,
Searched with Apollo's privilege;
Through man, and woman, and sea, and star,
Saw the dance of nature forward far;
Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times,
Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.


Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young,
And always keep us so.



ESSAY I _The Poet_

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons
knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination
for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are
beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures,
you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is
local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce
fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts
is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of
color or form, which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a
proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the
minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of
the instant dependence of form upon soul. There is no doctrine of
forms in our philosophy. We were put into our bodies, as fire is put
into a pan, to be carried about; but there is no accurate adjustment
between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter the
germination of the former. So in regard to other forms, the
intellectual men do not believe in any essential dependence of the
material world on thought and volition. Theologians think it a
pretty air-castle to talk of the spiritual meaning of a ship or a
cloud, of a city or a contract, but they prefer to come again to the
solid ground of historical evidence; and even the poets are contented