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

of Africa necessitated a nomadic life. But the nomads were the
terror of all those whom the soil, or the advantages of a market, had
induced to build towns. Agriculture, therefore, was a religious
injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism. And in
these late and civil countries of England and America, these
propensities still fight out the old battle in the nation and in the
individual. The nomads of Africa were constrained to wander by the
attacks of the gad-fly, which drives the cattle mad, and so compels
the tribe to emigrate in the rainy season, and to drive off the
cattle to the higher sandy regions. The nomads of Asia follow the
pasturage from month to month. In America and Europe, the nomadism
is of trade and curiosity; a progress, certainly, from the gad-fly of
Astaboras to the Anglo and Italo-mania of Boston Bay. Sacred cities,
to which a periodical religious pilgrimage was enjoined, or stringent
laws and customs, tending to invigorate the national bond, were the
check on the old rovers; and the cumulative values of long residence
are the restraints on the itineracy of the present day. The
antagonism of the two tendencies is not less active in individuals,
as the love of adventure or the love of repose happens to
predominate. A man of rude health and flowing spirits has the
faculty of rapid domestication, lives in his wagon, and roams through
all latitudes as easily as a Calmuc. At sea, or in the forest, or in
the snow, he sleeps as warm, dines with as good appetite, and
associates as happily, as beside his own chimneys. Or perhaps his
facility is deeper seated, in the increased range of his faculties of
observation, which yield him points of interest wherever fresh
objects meet his eyes. The pastoral nations were needy and hungry to
desperation; and this intellectual nomadism, in its excess, bankrupts
the mind, through the dissipation of power on a miscellany of
objects. The home-keeping wit, on the other hand, is that continence
or content which finds all the elements of life in its own soil; and
which has its own perils of monotony and deterioration, if not
stimulated by foreign infusions.

Every thing the individual sees without him corresponds to his
states of mind, and every thing is in turn intelligible to him, as
his onward thinking leads him into the truth to which that fact or
series belongs.

The primeval world, -- the Fore-World, as the Germans say, -- I
can dive to it in myself as well as grope for it with researching
fingers in catacombs, libraries, and the broken reliefs and torsos of
ruined villas.

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek
history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the
Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and
Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every
man passes personally through a Grecian period. The Grecian state is
the era of the bodily nature, the perfection of the senses, -- of the