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

explained to him. In a certain state of thought is the common origin
of very diverse works. It is the spirit and not the fact that is
identical. By a deeper apprehension, and not primarily by a painful
acquisition of many manual skills, the artist attains the power of
awakening other souls to a given activity.

It has been said, that "common souls pay with what they do;
nobler souls with that which they are." And why? Because a profound
nature awakens in us by its actions and words, by its very looks and
manners, the same power and beauty that a gallery of sculpture, or of
pictures, addresses.

Civil and natural history, the history of art and of
literature, must be explained from individual history, or must remain
words. There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not
interest us, -- kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron shoe, the
roots of all things are in man. Santa Croce and the Dome of St.
Peter's are lame copies after a divine model. Strasburg Cathedral is
a material counterpart of the soul of Erwin of Steinbach. The true
poem is the poet's mind; the true ship is the ship-builder. In the
man, could we lay him open, we should see the reason for the last
flourish and tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in the
sea-shell preexist in the secreting organs of the fish. The whole of
heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall
pronounce your name with all the ornament that titles of nobility
could ever add.

The trivial experience of every day is always verifying some
old prediction to us, and converting into things the words and signs
which we had heard and seen without heed. A lady, with whom I was
riding in the forest, said to me, that the woods always seemed to her
_to wait_, as if the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds
until the wayfarer has passed onward: a thought which poetry has
celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the
approach of human feet. The man who has seen the rising moon break
out of the clouds at midnight has been present like an archangel at
the creation of light and of the world. I remember one summer day,
in the fields, my companion pointed out to me a broad cloud, which
might extend a quarter of a mile parallel to the horizon, quite
accurately in the form of a cherub as painted over churches, -- a
round block in the centre, which it was easy to animate with eyes and
mouth, supported on either side by wide-stretched symmetrical wings.
What appears once in the atmosphere may appear often, and it was
undoubtedly the archetype of that familiar ornament. I have seen in
the sky a chain of summer lightning which at once showed to me that
the Greeks drew from nature when they painted the thunderbolt in the
hand of Jove. I have seen a snow-drift along the sides of the stone
wall which obviously gave the idea of the common architectural scroll
to abut a tower.