"Nature Adresses and Lectures" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

the landscape which they compose, is round and symmetrical. And as
the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters.
There is no object so foul that intense light will not make
beautiful. And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of
infinitude which it hath, like space and time, make all matter gay.
Even the corpse has its own beauty. But besides this general grace
diffused over nature, almost all the individual forms are agreeable
to the eye, as is proved by our endless imitations of some of them,
as the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the wheat-ear, the egg, the
wings and forms of most birds, the lion's claw, the serpent, the
butterfly, sea-shells, flames, clouds, buds, leaves, and the forms of
many trees, as the palm.

For better consideration, we may distribute the aspects of
Beauty in a threefold manner.

1. First, the simple perception of natural forms is a delight.
The influence of the forms and actions in nature, is so needful to
man, that, in its lowest functions, it seems to lie on the confines
of commodity and beauty. To the body and mind which have been
cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores
their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and
craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man
again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself. The health of the
eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can
see far enough.

But in other hours, Nature satisfies by its loveliness, and
without any mixture of corporeal benefit. I see the spectacle of
morning from the hill-top over against my house, from day-break to
sun-rise, with emotions which an angel might share. The long slender
bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From
the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to
partake its rapid transformations: the active enchantment reaches my
dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind. How does
Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a
day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my
Assyria; the sun-set and moon-rise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms
of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the
understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and
dreams.

Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility in the
afternoon, was the charm, last evening, of a January sunset. The
western clouds divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes
modulated with tints of unspeakable softness; and the air had so much
life and sweetness, that it was a pain to come within doors. What
was it that nature would say? Was there no meaning in the live
repose of the valley behind the mill, and which Homer or Shakspeare
could not reform for me in words? The leafless trees become spires