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

touched his mother earth, his strength was renewed. Man is the
broken giant, and, in all his weakness, both his body and his mind
are invigorated by habits of conversation with nature. The power of
music, the power of poetry to unfix, and, as it were, clap wings to
solid nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus. The philosophical
perception of identity through endless mutations of form makes him
know the Proteus. What else am I who laughed or wept yesterday, who
slept last night like a corpse, and this morning stood and ran? And
what see I on any side but the transmigrations of Proteus? I can
symbolize my thought by using the name of any creature, of any fact,
because every creature is man agent or patient. Tantalus is but a
name for you and me. Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking
the waters of thought which are always gleaming and waving within
sight of the soul. The transmigration of souls is no fable. I would
it were; but men and women are only half human. Every animal of the
barn-yard, the field, and the forest, of the earth and of the waters
that are under the earth, has contrived to get a footing and to leave
the print of its features and form in some one or other of these
upright, heaven-facing speakers. Ah! brother, stop the ebb of thy
soul, -- ebbing downward into the forms into whose habits thou hast
now for many years slid. As near and proper to us is also that old
fable of the Sphinx, who was said to sit in the road-side and put
riddles to every passenger. If the man could not answer, she
swallowed him alive. If he could solve the riddle, the Sphinx was
slain. What is our life but an endless flight of winged facts or
events! In splendid variety these changes come, all putting
questions to the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a
superior wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them. Facts
encumber them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine the
men of _sense_, in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished
every spark of that light by which man is truly man. But if the man
is true to his better instincts or sentiments, and refuses the
dominion of facts, as one that comes of a higher race, remains fast
by the soul and sees the principle, then the facts fall aptly and
supple into their places; they know their master, and the meanest of
them glorifies him.

See in Goethe's Helena the same desire that every word should
be a thing. These figures, he would say, these Chirons, Griffins,
Phorkyas, Helen, and Leda, are somewhat, and do exert a specific
influence on the mind. So far then are they eternal entities, as
real to-day as in the first Olympiad. Much revolving them, he writes
out freely his humor, and gives them body tohis own imagination. And
although that poem be as vague and fantastic as a dream, yet is it
much more attractive than the more regular dramatic pieces of the
same author, for the reason that it operates a wonderful relief to
the mind from the routine of customary images, -- awakens the
reader's invention and fancy by the wild freedom of the design, and
by the unceasing succession of brisk shocks of surprise.