"Address" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

AN ADDRESS

_Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College,
Cambridge, Sunday Evening, July 15, 1838_



In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the
breath of life. The grassurst, the meadow is spotted with fire and
gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet
with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay.
Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through
the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays.
Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The
cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes
again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never
displayed more happily. The corn and the wine have been freely dealt
to all creatures, and the never-broken silence with which the old
bounty goes forward, has not yielded yet one word of explanation.
One is constrained to respect the perfection of this world, in which
our senses converse. How wide; how rich; what invitation from every
property it gives to every faculty of man! In its fruitful soils; in
its navigable sea; in its mountains of metal and stone; in its
forests of all woods; in its animals; in its chemical ingredients; in
the powers and path of light, heat, attraction, and life, it is well
worth the pith and heart of great men to subdue and enjoy it. The
planters, the mechanics, the inventors, the astronomers, the builders
of cities, and the captains, history delights to honor.

But when the mind opens, and reveals the laws which traverse
the universe, and make things what they are, then shrinks the great
world at once into a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What
am I? and What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity
new-kindled, but never to be quenched. Behold these outrunning laws,
which our imperfect apprehension can see tend this way and that, but
not come full circle. Behold these infinite relations, so like, so
unlike; many, yet one. I would study, I would know, I would admire
forever. These works of thought have been the entertainments of the
human spirit in all ages.

A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man
when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. Then he is
instructed in what is above him. He learns that his being is without
bound; that, to the good, to the perfect, he is born, low as he now
lies in evil and weakness. That which he venerates is still his own,
though he has not realized it yet. _He ought_. He knows the sense
of that grand word, though his analysis fails entirely to render
account of it. When in innocency, or when by intellectual
perception, he attains to say, -- `I love the Right; Truth is
beautiful within and without, forevermore. Virtue, I am thine: save