"Essays 1st Series" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

fire, met his heart precisely as they meet mine. Then the vaunted
distinction between Greek and English, between Classic and Romantic
schools, seems superficial and pedantic. When a thought of Plato
becomes a thought to me, -- when a truth that fired the soul of
Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in
a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and
do, as it were, run into one, why should I measure degrees of
latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?

The student interprets the age of chivalry by his own age of
chivalry, and the days of maritime adventure and circumnavigation by
quite parallel miniature experiences of his own. To the sacred
history of the world, he has the same key. When the voice of a
prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a
sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then pierces to
the truth through all the confusion of tradition and the caricature
of institutions.

Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose
to us new facts in nature. I see that men of God have, from time to
time, walked among men and made their commission felt in the heart
and soul of the commonest hearer. Hence, evidently, the tripod, the
priest, the priestess inspired by the divine afflatus.

Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They cannot
unite him to history, or reconcile him with themselves. As they come
to revere their intuitions and aspire to live holily, their own piety
explains every fact, every word.


How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of Menu,
of Socrates, domesticate themselves in the mind. I cannot find any
antiquity in them. They are mine as much as theirs.

I have seen the first monks and anchorets without crossing seas
or centuries. More than once some individual has appeared to me with
such negligence of labor and such commanding contemplation, a haughty
beneficiary, begging in the name of God, as made good to the
nineteenth century Simeon the Stylite, the Thebais, and the first
Capuchins.

The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian, Brahmin,
Druid, and Inca, is expounded in the individual's private life. The
cramping influence of a hard formalist on a young child in repressing
his spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that
without producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even
much sympathy with the tyranny, -- is a familiar fact explained to
the child when he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of
his youth is himself a child tyrannized over by those names and words
and forms, of whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth.