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

of heaven. When a noble act is done, -- perchance in a scene of
great natural beauty; when Leonidas and his three hundred martyrs
consume one day in dying, and the sun and moon come each and look at
them once in the steep defile of Thermopylae; when Arnold Winkelried,
in the high Alps, under the shadow of the avalanche, gathers in his
side a sheaf of Austrian spears to break the line for his comrades;
are not these heroes entitled to add the beauty of the scene to the
beauty of the deed? When the bark of Columbus nears the shore of
America; -- before it, the beach lined with savages, fleeing out of
all their huts of cane; the sea behind; and the purple mountains of
the Indian Archipelago around, can we separate the man from the
living picture? Does not the New World clothe his form with her
palm-groves and savannahs as fit drapery? Ever does natural beauty
steal in like air, and envelope great actions. When Sir Harry Vane
was dragged up the Tower-hill, sitting on a sled, to suffer death, as
the champion of the English laws, one of the multitude cried out to
him, "You never sate on so glorious a seat." Charles II., to
intimidate the citizens of London, caused the patriot Lord Russel to
be drawn in an open coach, through the principal streets of the city,
on his way to the scaffold. "But," his biographer says, "the
multitude imagined they saw liberty and virtue sitting by his side."
In private places, among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism
seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its
candle. Nature stretcheth out her arms to embrace man, only let his
thoughts be of equal greatness. Willingly does she follow his steps
with the rose and the violet, and bend her lines of grandeur and
grace to the decoration of her darling child. Only let his thoughts
be of equal scope, and the frame will suit the picture. A virtuous
man is in unison with her works, and makes the central figure of the
visible sphere. Homer, Pindar, Socrates, Phocion, associate
themselves fitly in our memory with the geography and climate of
Greece. The visible heavens and earth sympathize with Jesus. And in
common life, whosoever has seen a person of powerful character and
happy genius, will have remarked how easily he took all things along
with him, -- the persons, the opinions, and the day, and nature
became ancillary to a man.

3. There is still another aspect under which the beauty of the
world may be viewed, namely, as it become s an object of the
intellect. Beside the relation of things to virtue, they have a
relation to thought. The intellect searches out the absolute order
of things as they stand in the mind of God, and without the colors of
affection. The intellectual and the active powers seem to succeed
each other, and the exclusive activity of the one, generates the
exclusive activity of the other. There is something unfriendly in
each to the other, but they are like the alternate periods of feeding
and working in animals; each prepares and will be followed by the
other. Therefore does beauty, which, in relation to actions, as we
have seen, comes unsought, and comes because it is unsought, remain
for the apprehension and pursuit of the intellect; and then again, in