"SCHOLAR" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

last of their pine-trees. Authors we have, in numbers, who have
written out their vein, and who, moved by a commendable prudence,
sail for Greece or Palestine, follow the trapper into the prairie, or
ramble round Algiers, to replenish their merchantable stock.

If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous
of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country
labors; in town, -- in the insight into trades and manufactures; in
frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the
one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to
illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any
speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the
splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from
whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day. This
is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the
language which the field and the work-yard made.

But the final value of action, like that of books, and better
than books, is, that it is a resource. That great principle of
Undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring
of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea;
in day and night; in heat and cold; and as yet more deeply ingrained
in every atom and every fluid, is known to us under the name of
Polarity, -- these "fits of easy transmission and reflection," as
Newton called them, are the law of nature because they are the law of
spirit.

The mind now thinks; now acts; and each fit reproduces the
other. When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy
no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended, and books
are a weariness, -- he has always the resource _to live_. Character
is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the
functionary. The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will
be strong to live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or
medium to impart his truths? He can still fall back on this
elemental force of living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a
partial act. Let the grandeur of justice shine in his affairs. Let
the beauty of affection cheer his lowly roof. Those `far from fame,'
who dwell and act with him, will feel the force of his constitution
in the doings and passages of the day better than it can be measured
by any public and designed display. Time shall teach him, that the
scholar loses no hour which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the
sacred germ of his instinct, screened from influence. What is lost
in seemliness is gained in strength. Not out of those, on whom
systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful
giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled
savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last
Alfred and Shakspeare.

I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of