Essays
contributor: Eric Lease Morgan (Infomotions, Inc.)
creator: Emerson, Ralph Waldo
extent: 334464
format: text/plain
language: en
publisher: Eris Etext Project
rights: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/
source: 6
subject: man
subject: nature
subject: life
subject: power
subject: essay
subject: poet
subject: esteemed
subject: umpires
subject: taste
subject: emerson
subject: ralph
subject: waldo
subject: essays
subject: american
subject: literature
type: text
local mirror: emerson-essays-232.txt
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plain html: emerson-essays-232.htm
sort title: Essays
full text: ESSAYS _Second Series_ by Ralph Waldo Emerson THE POET A moody child and wildly wise Pursued the game with joyful eyes, Which chose, like meteors, their way, And rived the dark with private ray: They overleapt the horizon's edge, Searched with Apollo's privilege; Through man, and woman, and sea, and star, Saw the dance of nature forward far; Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times, Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes. Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so. ESSAY I _The Poet_ Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form, which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul. There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to be carried about; but there is no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter the germination of the former. So in regard to other forms, the intellectual men do not believe in any essential dependence of the material world on thought and volition. Theologians think it a pretty air-castle to talk of the spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, of a city or a contract, but they prefer to come again to the solid ground of historical evidence; and even the poets are contented with a civil and conformed manner of living, and to write …