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

one man in which we recognize the same character! Observe the
sources of our information in respect to the Greek genius. We have
the _civil history_ of that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides,
Xenophon, and Plutarch have given it; a very sufficient account of
what manner of persons they were, and what they did. We have the
same national mind expressed for us again in their _literature_, in
epic and lyric poems, drama, and philosophy; a very complete form.
Then we have it once more in their _architecture_, a beauty as of
temperance itself, limited to the straight line and the square, -- a
builded geometry. Then we have it once again in _sculpture_, the
"tongue on the balance of expression," a multitude of forms in the
utmost freedom of action, and never transgressing the ideal serenity;
like votaries performing some religious dance before the gods, and,
though in convulsive pain or mortal combat, never daring to break the
figure and decorum of their dance. Thus, of the genius of one
remarkable people, we have a fourfold representation: and to the
senses what more unlike than an ode of Pindar, a marble centaur, the
peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last actions of Phocion?

Every one must have observed faces and forms which, without any
resembling feature, make a like impression on the beholder. A
particular picture or copy of verses, if it do not awaken the same
train of images, will yet superinduce the same sentiment as some wild
mountain walk, although the resemblance is nowise obvious to the
senses, but is occult and out of the reach of the understanding.
Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws.
She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her
works; and delights in startling us with resemblances in the most
unexpected quarters. I have seen the head of an old sachem of the
forest, which at once reminded the eye of a bald mountain summit, and
the furrows of the brow suggested the strata of the rock. There are
men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and
awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of
the earliest Greek art. And there are compositions of the same
strain to be found in the books of all ages. What is Guido's
Rospigliosi Aurora but a morning thought, as the horses in it are
only a morning cloud. If any one will but take pains to observe the
variety of actions to which he is equally inclined in certain moods
of mind, and those to which he is averse, he will see how deep is the
chain of affinity.

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some
sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its
form merely, -- but, by watching for a time his motions and plays,
the painter enters into his nature, and can then draw him at will in
every attitude. So Roos "entered into the inmost nature of a sheep."
I knew a draughtsman employed in a public survey, who found that he
could not sketch the rocks until their geological structure was first