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

"Ne te quaesiveris extra."


"Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."
_Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's_
_Honest Man's Fortune_


Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat;
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.



ESSAY II _Self-Reliance_

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter
which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an
admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The
sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may
contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true
for you in your private heart is true for all men, -- that is genius.
Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense;
for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,---- and our first
thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.
Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we
ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books
and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man
should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes
across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of
bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought,
because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own
rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated
majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us
than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with
good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is
on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly
good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and
we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the
conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he
must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though
the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can