Evolution of Expression — Volume 1Emerson, Charles Wesley
Science
Evolution of Expression — Volume 1
Emerson, Charles Wesley
Elocution; Recitations
Now for the fight--now for the cannon-peal--
Forward--through blood and toil, and cloud and
fire!
Glorious the shout, the shock, the crash of steel,
The volley's roll, the rocket's blasting spire;
They shake--like broken waves their squares
retire,--
On, them, hussars!--now give them rein and heel;
Think of the orphaned child, the murdered sire:--
Earth cries for blood--in thunder on them wheel!
This hour to Europe's fate shall set the triumph seal.
KARL THEODORE KORNER.
SELF-RELIANCE.
1. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for
you in your private heart is true for all men,--that is genius.
Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense;
for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first
thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last
Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the
highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they
set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but
what THEY thought.
2. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light
which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of
the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice
his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we
recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a
certain alienated majesty.
3. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than
this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with
good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices
is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with
masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all
the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own
opinion from another.
4. There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the
conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that
he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that
though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing
corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of
ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in
him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he
can do, nor does he know until he has tried. 5. Not for nothing
one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him,
and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without pre-
established harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall,
that it might testify of that particular ray.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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