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

of flame in the sunset, with the blue east for their back-ground, and
the stars of the dead calices of flowers, and every withered stem and
stubble rimed with frost, contribute something to the mute music.

The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country landscape is
pleasant only half the year. I please myself with the graces of the
winter scenery, and believe that we are as much touched by it as by
the genial influences of summer. To the attentive eye, each moment
of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds,
every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall
never be seen again. The heavens change every moment, and reflect
their glory or gloom on the plains beneath. The state of the crop in
the surrounding farms alters the expression of the earth from week to
week. The succession of native plants in the pastures and roadsides,
which makes the silent clock by which time tells the summer hours,
will make even the divisions of the day sensible to a keen observer.
The tribes of birds and insects, like the plants punctual to their
time, follow each other, and the year has room for all. By
water-courses, the variety is greater. In July, the blue pontederia
or pickerel-weed blooms in large beds in the shallow parts of our
pleasant river, and swarms with yellow butterflies in continual
motion. Art cannot rival this pomp of purple and gold. Indeed the
river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament.

But this beauty of Nature which is seen and felt as beauty, is
the least part. The shows of day, the dewy morning, the rainbow,
mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still
water, and the like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and
mock us with their unreality. Go out of the house to see the moon,
and 't is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines
upon your necessary journey. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow
afternoons of October, who ever could clutch it? Go forth to find
it, and it is gone: 't is only a mirage as you look from the windows
of diligence.

2. The presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual element
is essential to its perfection. The high and divine beauty which can
be loved without effeminacy, is that which is found in combination
with the human will. Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every
natural action is graceful. Every heroic act is also decent, and
causes the place and the bystanders to shine. We are taught by great
actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.
Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It
is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creep into a
corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled
to the world by his constitution. In proportion to the energy of his
thought and will, he takes up the world into himself. "All those
things for which men plough, build, or sail, obey virtue;" said
Sallust. "The winds and waves," said Gibbon, "are always on the side
of the ablest navigators." So are the sun and moon and all the stars