In Tune with the Infinite; or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and PlentyTrine, Ralph Waldo
Religion
In Tune with the Infinite; or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty
Trine, Ralph Waldo
New Thought
It is this same spiritual power that the author of a great personality
puts into his work, that causes it to go so rapidly from reader to
reader; for the only way that any book circulates in the ultimate is
from mouth to mouth, any book that reaches a large circulation. It is
this that many times causes a single reader, in view of its value to
himself, to purchase numbers of copies for others. "A good poem," says
Emerson, "goes about the world offering itself to reasonable men, who
read it with joy and carry it to their reasonable neighbors. Thus it
draws to it the _wise and generous souls_, confirming their secret
thoughts, and through their sympathy _really publishing itself_."
This is the type of author who writes not with the thought of having
what he writes become literature, but he writes with the sole thought
of reaching the hearts of the people, giving them something of vital
value, something that will broaden, sweeten, enrich, and beautify their
lives; that will lead them to the finding of the higher life and with
it the higher powers and the higher joys. It most always happens,
however, that if he succeeds in thus reaching the people, the becoming
literature part somehow takes care of itself, and far better than if he
aimed for it directly.
The one, on the other hand, who fears to depart from beaten paths, who
allows himself to be bound by arbitrary rules, limits his own creative
powers in just the degree that he allows himself so to be bound. "My
book," says one of the greatest of modern authors, "shall smell of the
pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window
shall interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my
web also." Far better, gentle sage, to have it smell of the pines and
resound with the hum of insects than to have it sound of the rules that
a smaller type of man gets by studying the works of a few great,
fearless writers like yourself, and formulating from what he thus gains
a handbook of rhetoric. "Of no use are the men who study to do exactly
as was done before, who can never understand that _today is a new day_."
When Shakspeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies:
"Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead
bodies and brought them into life." This is the type of man who
doesn't move the world's way, but who moves the world his way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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