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

the lengthened shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of the Hermit
Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of
Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called "the height of
Rome"; and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography
of a few stout and earnest persons.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet.
Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a
charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists
for him. But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself
which corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculptured a
marble god, feels poor when he looks on these. To him a palace, a
statue, or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air, much like
a gay equipage, and seem to say like that, `Who are you, Sir?' Yet
they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his
faculties that they will come out and take possession. The picture
waits for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am to settle its
claims to praise. That popular fable of the sot who was picked up
dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and
dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with
all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been
insane, owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well
the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then
wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history, our
imagination plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate,
are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small
house and common day's work; but the things of life are the same to
both; the sum total of both is the same. Why all this deference to
Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous;
did they wear out virtue? As great a stake depends on your private
act to-day, as followed their public and renowned steps. When
private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be
transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.

The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so
magnetized the eyes of nations. It has been taught by this colossal
symbol the mutual reverence that is due from man to man. The joyful
loyalty with which men have everywhere suffered the king, the noble,
or the great proprietor to walk among them by a law of his own, make
his own scale of men and things, and reverse theirs, pay for benefits
not with money but with honor, and represent the law in his person,
was the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified their
consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right of every
man.

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained
when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What
is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be