Natural history of intellect, and other papersEmerson, Ralph Waldo
Philosophy
Natural history of intellect, and other papers
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
American essays -- 19th century; Boston (Mass.); Intellect; Memory; Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1475-1564; Milton, John, 1608-1674
Man is not so far lost but that he suffers ever the great Discontent
which is the elegy of his loss and the prediction of his recovery.
In the gay saloon he laments that these figures are not what
Raphael and Guercino painted. Withered though he stand, and trifler
though he be, the august spirit of the world looks out from his
eyes. In his heart he knows the ache of spiritual pain, and his
thought can animate the sea and land. What then shall hinder the
Genius of the time from speaking its thought? It cannot be silent,
if it would. It will write in a higher spirit and a wider knowledge
and with a grander practical aim than ever yet guided the pen of
poet. It will write the annals of a changed world, and record the
descent of principles into practice, of love into Government, of
love into Trade. It will describe the new heroic life of man, the
now unbelieved possibility of simple living and of clean and noble
relations with men. Religion will bind again these that were sometime
frivolous, customary, enemies, skeptics, self-seekers, into a joyful
reverence for the circumambient Whole, and that which was ecstacy
shall become daily bread.
II.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.[6]
We sometimes meet in a stage coach in New England an erect, muscular
man, with fresh complexion and a smooth hat, whose nervous speech
instantly betrays the English traveller;—a man nowise cautious to
conceal his name or that of his native country, or his very slight
esteem for the persons and the country that surround him. When Mr.
Bull rides in an American coach, he speaks quick and strong; he
is very ready to confess his ignorance of everything about him,
persons, manners, customs, politics, geography. He wonders that the
Americans should build with wood, whilst all this stone is lying in
the roadside; and is astonished to learn that a wooden house may last
a hundred years; nor will he remember the fact as many minutes after
it has been told him: he wonders that they do not make elder-wine and
cherry-bounce, since here are cherries, and every mile is crammed
with elder-bushes. He has never seen a good horse in America, nor a
good coach, nor a good inn. Here is very good earth and water and
plenty of them; that he is free to allow; to all other gifts of
nature or man his eyes are sealed by the inexorable demand for the
precise conveniences to which he is accustomed in England. Add to
this proud blindness the better quality of great downrightness in
speaking the truth, and the love of fair play, on all occasions, and
moreover the peculiarity which is alleged of the Englishman, that his
virtues do not come out until he quarrels.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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