"Emerson, Ralph W. - The Method of Nature" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

exhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work. Genius is
its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture
from within, going abroad only for audience, and spectator, as we
adapt our voice and phrase to the distance and character of the ear
we speak to. All your learning of all literatures would never enable
you to anticipate one of its thoughts or expressions, and yet each is
natural and familiar as household words. Here about us coils forever
the ancient enigma, so old and so unutterable. Behold! there is the
sun, and the rain, and the rocks: the old sun, the old stones. How
easy were it to describe all this fitly; yet no word can pass.
Nature is a mute, and man, her articulate speaking brother, lo! he
also is a mute. Yet when Genius arrives, its speech is like a river;
it has no straining to describe, more than there is straining in
nature to exist. When thought is best, there is most of it. Genius
sheds wisdom like perfume, and advertises us that it flows out of a
deeper source than the foregoing silence, that it knows so deeply and
speaks so musically, because it is itself a mutation of the thing it
describes. It is sun and moon and wave and fire in music, as
astronomy is thought and harmony in masses of matter.

What is all history but the work of ideas, a record of the
incomputable energy which his infinite aspirations infuse into man?
Has any thing grand and lasting been done? Who did it? Plainly not
any man, but all men: it was the prevalence and inundation of an
idea. What brought the pilgrims here? One man says, civil liberty;
another, the desire of founding a church; and a third, discovers that
the motive force was plantation and trade. But if the Puritans could
rise from the dust, they could not answer. It is to be seen in what
they were, and not in what they designed; it was the growth and
expansion of the human race, and resembled herein the sequent
Revolution, which was not begun in Concord, or Lexington, or
Virginia, but was the overflowing of the sense of natural right in
every clear and active spirit of the period. Is a man boastful and
knowing, and his own master? -- we turn from him without hope: but
let him be filled with awe and dread before the Vast and the Divine,
which uses him glad to be used, and our eye is riveted to the chain
of events. What a debt is ours to that old religion which, in the
childhood of most of us, still dwelt like a sabbath morning in the
country of New England, teaching privation, self-denial and sorrow!
A man was born not for prosperity, but to suffer for the benefit of
others, like the noble rock-maple which all around our villages
bleeds for the service of man. Not praise, not men's acceptance of
our doing, but the spirit's holy errand through us absorbed the
thought. How dignified was this! How all that is called talents and
success, in our noisy capitals, becomes buzz and din before this
man-worthiness! How our friendships and the complaisances we use,
shame us now! Shall we not quit our companions, as if they were
thieves and pot-companions, and betake ourselves to some desert cliff
of mount Katahdin, some unvisited recess in Moosehead Lake, to bewail
our innocency and to recover it, and with it the power to communicate