"LIT ETHC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

To feel the full value of these lives, as occasions of hope and
provocation, you must come to know, that each admirable genius is but
a successful diver in that sea whose floor of pearls is all your own.
The impoverishing philosophy of ages has laid stress on the
distinctions of the individual, and not on the universal attributes
of man. The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails
to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he
admires. In solitude, in a remote village, the ardent youth loiters
and mourns. With inflamed eye, in this sleeping wilderness, he has
read the story of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, until his fancy has
brought home to the surrounding woods, the faint roar of cannonades
in the Milanese, and marches in Germany. He is curious concerning
that man's day. What filled it? the crowded orders, the stern
decisions, the foreign despatches, the Castilian etiquette? The soul
answers -- Behold his day here! In the sighing of these woods, in
the quiet of these gray fields, in the cool breeze that sings out of
these northern mountains; in the workmen, the boys, the maidens, you
meet, -- in the hopes of the morning, the ennui of noon, and
sauntering of the afternoon; in the disquieting comparisons; in the
regrets at want of vigor; in the great idea, and the puny execution;
-- behold Charles the Fifth's day; another, yet the same; behold
Chatham's, Hampden's, Bayard's, Alfred's, Scipio's, Pericles's day,
-- day of all that are born of women. The difference of circumstance
is merely costume. I am tasting the self-same life, -- its
sweetness, its greatness, its pain, which I so admire in other men.
Do not foolishly ask of the inscrutable, obliterated past, what it
cannot tell, -- the details of that nature, of that day, called
Byron, or Burke; -- but ask it of the enveloping Now; the more
quaintly you inspect its evanescent beauties, its wonderful details,
its spiritual causes, its astounding whole, -- so much the more you
master the biography of this hero, and that, and every hero. Be lord
of a day, through wisdom and justice, and you can put up your history
books.

An intimation of these broad rights is familiar in the sense of
injury which men feel in the assumption of any man to limit their
possible progress. We resent all criticism, which denies us any
thing that lies in our line of advance. Say to the man of letters,
that he cannot paint a Transfiguration, or build a steamboat, or be a
grand-marshal, -- and he will not seem to himself depreciated. But
deny to him any quality of literary or metaphysical power, and he is
piqued. Concede to him genius, which is a sort of Stoical _plenum_
annulling the comparative, and he is content; but concede him talents
never so rare, denying him genius, and he is aggrieved. What does
this mean? Why simply, that the soul has assurance, by instincts and
presentiments, of _all_ power in the direction of its ray, as well as
of the special skills it has already acquired.

In order to a knowledge of the resources of the scholar, we
must not rest in the use of slender accomplishments, -- of faculties