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

The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature of the
bard, sits on his neck and writes through his hand; so that when he
seems to vent a mere caprice and wild romance, the issue is an exact
allegory. Hence Plato said that "poets utter great and wise things
which they do not themselves understand." All the fictions of the
Middle Age explain themselves as a masked or frolic expression of
that which in grave earnest the mind of that period toiled to
achieve. Magic, and all that is ascribed to it, is a deep
presentiment of the powers of science. The shoes of swiftness, the
sword of sharpness, the power of subduing the elements, of using the
secret virtues of minerals, of understanding the voices of birds, are
the obscure efforts of the mind in a right direction. The
preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual youth, and
the like, are alike the endeavour of the human spirit "to bend the
shows of things to the desires of the mind."

In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul, a garland and a rose bloom
on the head of her who is faithful, and fade on the brow of the
inconstant. In the story of the Boy and the Mantle, even a mature
reader may be surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at the
triumph of the gentle Genelas; and, indeed, all the postulates of
elfin annals, -- that the fairies do not like to be named; that their
gifts are capricious and not to be trusted; that who seeks a treasure
must not speak; and the like, -- I find true in Concord, however they
might be in Cornwall or Bretagne.

Is it otherwise in the newest romance? I read the Bride of
Lammermoor. Sir William Ashton is a mask for a vulgar temptation,
Ravenswood Castle a fine name for proud poverty, and the foreign
mission of state only a Bunyan disguise for honest industry. We may
all shoot a wild bull that would toss the good and beautiful, by
fighting down the unjust and sensual. Lucy Ashton is another name
for fidelity, which is always beautiful and always liable to calamity
in this world.
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But along with the civil and metaphysical history of man,
another history goes daily forward, -- that of the external world, --
in which he is not less strictly implicated. He is the compend of
time; he is also the correlative of nature. His power consists in
the multitude of his affinities, in the fact that his life is
intertwined with the whole chain of organic and inorganic being. In
old Rome the public roads beginning at the Forum proceeded north,
south, east, west, to the centre of every province of the empire,
making each market-town of Persia, Spain, and Britain pervious to the
soldiers of the capital: so out of the human heart go, as it were,
highways to the heart of every object in nature, to reduce it under
the dominion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of
roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer
to natures out of him, and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the