Tuesday, August 2, 2022

Emerson and the Examined Life






https://youtu.be/pMhmoH42bRs



Robert Pinsky, award-winning author and poet, Richard Geldard and David M. Robinson, Emerson scholars, celebrate the bicentennial of Ralph Waldo Emerson with a live reading from famous American essays including Self-Reliance, The Oversoul and The American Scholar.  Ralph Waldo Emerson was an essayist, orator, poet and philosopher whose vibrant words and original insights were meant to be heard by an engaged audience.  The Pinsky reading will serve as living tribute to "the sage of Concord" in his 200th year.

https://youtu.be/pMhmoH42bRs





Robert Pinsky, poet laureate of the United States (1997-2000), is poetry editor of the online journal Slate and a contributor to The Newshour with Jim Lehrer on PBS.  He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University.  His book, The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems (1965-1995) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and also received the Lenore Marshall Award, the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union.  His latest collection of poems is iJersey Rain/i; in November 1999 he published the anthology Americans' Favorite Poems, a collection of poems featured in Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project, and in June 2002 published Poems to Read:  On Youth, Darkness, Passion and Other Subjects.  His book Democracy, Culture and the Voice of the Public was published in September 2002.  



For more information on upcoming Emerson events, please visit Faneuil Hall Forum.



"Emerson's mind still provides the model of a central American intellectual and spiritual quest.  Even his occasional shimmery vague patches, as much as his noble flights, embody something essential and familiar.  We recognize much in our high art and low entertainment, in our politics and our manners, in his way of moving into and around a subject: the Emersonian sentences moving in a way that is fluid, heuristic, soaring and faltering, shifting in a sometimes casual way between oratory and introspection, an enterprise perpetually making itself up as it goes along.  Uniquely, Emerson's genius successfully embodies itself as the poet and the lecturer in a single gesture, dreamy yet hortatory.  At the juncture of inward meditation and passionate public speech, somehow both civic and idiosyncratic, Emerson calls us toward the best in our national character in an intrepid, candid, morally ambitious voice we can hope to recognize as our heritage."       



- Robert Pinsky
 





Nature Essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson




 


https://youtu.be/3r3_7enrsxQ






Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Information Overload is the Bane of my Life


My daily struggle is to understand what is important, to my situation, in the constant barrage of information on the Internet.  


What can and should be ignored?  

Is my purpose to seek distraction, novelty and entertainment? 

Or is the goal and purpose to my Net Surfing to gain valuable knowledge?  

What do I hope to accomplish?



“There are things that attract human attention, and there is often a huge gap between what is important and what is attractive and interesting."

Yuval Noah Harari   

  

And Donald Trump has not helped make being informed easy with all his mixed messages.


“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell


Thursday, October 1, 2015

Harold Bloom: Culture Gods from Emerson to Bird


Harold Bloom: Culture Gods from Emerson to Bird

     “If God appeared in 19th Century America,” 

, “it was as Ralph Waldo Emerson.  In the 20th Century it would have been as Charlie Parker.”

     Who knew that Yale’s monumental literature man was a bebopper?  No mererecord collector, either.  Bloom remembers haunting Minton’s and other Harlem hatcheries of the new jazz in the 1940s.  A half century ago he handed the collected poems of one idol, Hart Crane, to another, the pianist Bud Powell, whose “Un Poco Loco” is short-listed with, say, Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letteramong Bloom’s all-time all-American aesthetic statements.  And in Professor Bloom spelled out exactly what he thinks the connections are.

     The Sage of New Haven helped revive the late Sage of Concord in the 1960s.  This summer, Emerson’s 200th, it is Bloom’s effusive devotion that rules the international birthday party.  Bloom does not quite confer supremacy on Emerson, though he believes Emerson made our greatest writer, Walt Whitman, possible.  Emerson made the rest of our literary culture (Emily Dickinson to Henry James to Robert Frost to Don DeLillo) possible, necessary and perhaps inevitable.  “The whole phenomenon of American culture,” said Bloom, “on every level down to popular culture… is a profoundly Emersonian affair.  He has prophesied everything…  He is the mind of America.  He is not only the first absolutely original mind to appear in the United States, but he usurped everything that could be peculiarly American about thought as such.”

     It is Bloom’s way to digress, and by the end of an afternoon we had littered acres of artistic ground with scores and scores of dropped names.   of this conversation is a modern walk in the Emersonian woods, lit by Bloom’s astonishing memory for people and lines and history, and with several touches of Bloom’s high style of invective.  Richard Rorty and the late Bart Giamatti come up as good guys; Dubya, Cheney and Rummy as fools; Robert Penn Warren and Allen Ginsberg as departed friends with whom the voluble Bloom is still arguing.   is not least a catalog of people who hated Emerson (Southerners in his lifetime and ever after, including C. Vann Woodward, Allen Tate and “Red” Warren; but also T. S. Eliot and even Herman Melville, who mocked Emerson in his fiction) and those who loved him and/or owed him (including W. E. B. DuBois, William James, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry David Thoreau, Wallace Stevens,  the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges and the American novelist of Invisible Man, Ralph Waldo Ellison).   is contemporary and personal.  It was my Emersonian confession, “he speaks to me,” that prompted Harold Bloom.  Lost and depressed in his own dark wood in his mid-thirties, Bloom said, he had read forward and back in Emerson’s Journals “morning noon and night and all night long,” and “I felt that every phrase he had ever written he was speaking directly to me…  I still feel that way,” he said.  “There are many many sentences in which I feel that Emerson is more than speaking to me.  He has gotten inside my inner ear and has become indeed the the best and oldest part of myself.  Indeed, it is the God within, as it were, that speaks.”

     Who speaks with Emerson’s range and affirmation in our lifetimes?  I tried on Professor Bloom my notion that Duke Ellington cut his own original Emersonian figure for the 20th Century. An enabler who was both major composer and itinerant performance artist, in long forms and short, for dance halls and cathedrals, Ellington was a blues man of surpassing public style and inner ecstasies.  It intrigues me that both Emerson and Ellington were towering individualists set each in his own band of eccentric voices–Ellington in his orchestra, Emerson in the Concord circle.  Harold Bloom was wide open to transferring the modern Emerson search into the music world, but his taste is for the blazing solo voices from Louis Armstrong to Sonny Rollins, with Charlie Parker presiding over the Pantheon.  Listen in.  .   and .

Saturday, February 11, 2012

RWE.org - Complete Works of RWE



RWE.org - Complete Works of RWE:









RWE.org - Complete Works of RWE

I - Nature, Addresses & Lectures ( 19 Articles )



Volume I, Nature, Addresses and Lectures, contains Emerson's first published work, Nature, originally published anonymously in 1836 as a ninety-five page volume. At the time it was considered "one of most startlingly new notes, all circumstances considered, ever to be struck in American literature." The little book did not sell well, but it drew great interest to Emerson and helped to launch his career as a lecturer.


The rest of the volume contains important work, including "The American Scholar," delivered at Harvard in 1837, and the great "Divinity School Address," which was so controversial that Emerson was not invited back to speak at Harvard for thirty years.
II - Essays I ( 12 Articles )



Volume II, Essays First Series, was first published in 1841 by Jas. Monroe & Sons, Boston. The first reviews were mixed, varying according to biased opinions about this "new thought." After Emerson's death, the work appeared as Volume II in the Centenary Edition, published by Houghton Mifflin. A newly edited volume was published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 1979.


III - Essays II ( 9 Articles )



Essays, Second Series, was originally published in 1844, three years after Essays, First Series. The major event in Emerson's life during this period was the death of his son,Waldo, Jr., aged five, who died quite suddenly in 1842 from scarlet fever. The essay "Experience" reflects this tragic event and is thought by many to signal a turning point in Emerson's vision. But the rest of the volume continues the major themes begun earlier.
IV - Representative Men ( 7 Articles )



In Representative Men Emerson explores the theme of "The Uses of Great Men" and in that introductory essay, he deals with the important issue of the differences between genius and so-called "ordinary" persons. He was a great beliver in the idea that "There is one mind common to all individual men" and that "in every work of genious we recognize our own rejected thoughts."
V - English Traits ( 19 Articles )



English Traits was published first in 1856 and is different from the rest of Emerson's works in that rather than concerning the inner life and Emerson's major themes of self-recovery and self-reliance, the book is about a country and its people. It praises England and its people while also pointing out limitations and failures. He admires the English most of all for their common sense. As he wrote, "An Englishman must be treated with sincerity and reality; with muffins and not the promise of muffins."
VI - Conduct of Life ( 9 Articles )



The Conduct of Life was first published in 1860 at the height of Emerson's fame. The book was well received and sold very well. His English friend Thomas Carlyle said about it, "I read it a great while ago...with a satisfaction given me by the Books of no other living mortal." Published on the eve of the Civil War, the essays are particularly important for an understanding of America just prior to her greatest challenge and threat to her survival as a nation. Â Â
VII - Society and Solitude ( 12 Articles )



Society and Solitude, not published until 1870, is comprised of lectures turned into essays that Emerson gave over many years as he toured the country. "Eloquence" and "Domestic Life," for example, were early lectures. Those interested in ethical principles will appreciate "Courage" and "Success," whereas those more interested in daily life will appreciate the remaining essays in this volume.
VIII - Letters and Social Aims ( 11 Articles )



Blurb on Volume VIII - Letters and Social Aims Blurb on Volume VIII - Letters and Social Aims Blurb on Volume VIII - Letters and Social Aims Blurb on Volume VIII - Letters and Social Aims Blurb on Volume VIII - Letters and Social Aims
IX - Poems ( 2 Articles )



Emerson always thought of himself as a poet, and he found that as he prepared lectures and essays for publication, his work was often interrupted by the urge to write a poem. In some cases, such as the justly famous "Threnody," a poem emerged from a tragic event, like the death of his son Waldo, Jr. But in most cases, Nature was the inspiration. One of his final poems, "Terminus" reflects what he saw as the lessening of his creative powers. It is, in many ways, the most moving of all his poems.
X - Lectures and Biographical Sketches ( 19 Articles )



Volume X, Lectures and Biographical Sketches, collects some of the most interesting examples of Emerson's thought. His lecture on "Demonology," for example, warns against what he calls the "low curiosity" of the paranormal. "Education" is of great interest to teachers and the lecture has been used often by reformers in the field. The address entitled "Thoreau" was delivered at the funeral of Henry David Thoreau in May, 1862, and is the finest reminiscence we have of Emerson's great friend.


XI - Miscellanies ( 29 Articles )



The final volume of the Complete Works, Miscellanies, gathers together a diverse and unrelated selection of lectures and essays. Of particular importance is "The Lord's Supper," Emerson's final sermon as Junior Minister of the Second Church in Boston. Also of interest is the "Historical Discourse in Concord," which traces the important history of the town in American history. Also, "The Fugitive Slave Law" represents Emerson's emergence as an active participant in the anti-slavery movement in America.
XII - Natural History of the Intellect ( 18 Articles )



Volume XII, Natural History of the Intellect, was published by Emerson's editor and first biographer, James Elliot Cabot. The lectures in this volume were begun in England, worked on over the years, repeated during a Harvard course in 1871 and finally published in 1893, after Emerson's death. The essays are particularly important for a complete understanding of Emerson's view of the mind and his ongoing interest in the nature of consciousness.










'via Blog this'

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Ralph Waldo Emerson | Reference.com

Ralph Waldo Emerson | Reference.com


http://www.rwe.org/index.php


www.reference.com/motif/Arts/analysis+of+nature+by+ralp...
There is an analysis available of the book Nature written by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The book was written in 1836. If you visit the site http://www.rwe.org/works/Nature_ ...
www.reference.com/motif/Arts/summary+of+nature+by+ralph...
'The Summary of Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson begins by stating, ''Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, a ...
www.reference.com/motif/Reference/beauty+quotes
'There are so many beautiful beauty quotes and some that are not quite so beautiful...'Beauty comes in all sizes ---- not just size 5.' Roseanne'Beauty is not in the fac ...
www.reference.com/motif/Games/bon+voyage+quotes
'If someone is traveling and you wish to send them off with a bon voyage quote look no further.'Happy the man who, like Ulysses, has made a fine voyage, or has won the G ...
www.reference.com/motif/Arts/famous+essays
Famous essays are short literary pieces focused on examining, speculating or interpreting a theme or subject. At some point, most students will be required to write an ...
uk.ask.com/question/what-is-ralph-waldo-emerson-famous-...
Ralph Waldo Emerson's father was the seventh in an unbroken line of ministers dating back to Puritan days, and after attending Harvard Emers ... view more. ... What was Ralph Waldo Emersonfamous for
"The Summary of Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson begins by stating, ""Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes."" He is making the point that much of our knowledge is gained by reliance upon recorded authorities, upon the written word; thus Read more....

'via Blog this'

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Affirmations For Artists

"I will be organized. To that end, I will take stock and see what organization I really need. I will not stop at straightening my desk, but will better organize my thoughts and more clearly envision the great work I intend to do. I will risk re-organizing the pieces that comprise the puzzle of my life."


Eric Manzel

Monday, March 8, 2010

Beginning

NATURE

BY

R. W. EMERSON


A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.


INTRODUCTION.

OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?

All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE. In enumerating the values of nature and casting up their sum, I shall use the word in both senses;—in its common and in its philosophical import. In inquiries so general as our present one, the inaccuracy is not material; no confusion of thought will occur.

Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture. But his operations taken together are so insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result.

Chapter 1

NATURE.

CHAPTER I.

TO go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.

When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet. The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says,—he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight.

Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II.

COMMODITY.

WHOEVER considers the final cause of the world, will discern a multitude of uses that result. They all admit of being thrown into one of the following classes; Commodity; Beauty; Language; and Discipline.

Under the general name of Commodity, I rank all those advantages which our senses owe to nature. This, of course, is a benefit which is temporary and mediate, not ultimate, like its service to the soul. Yet although low, it is perfect in its kind, and is the only use of nature which all men apprehend. The misery of man appears like childish petulance, when we explore the steady and prodigal provision that has been made for his support and delight on this green ball which floats him through the heavens. What angels invented these splendid ornaments, these rich conveniences, this ocean of air above, this ocean of water beneath, this firmament of earth between? this zodiac of lights, this tent of dropping clouds, this striped coat of climates, this fourfold year? Beasts, fire, water, stones, and corn serve him. The field is at once his floor, his work-yard, his play-ground, his garden, and his bed.

     "More servants wait on man
     Than he'll take notice of."—

Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other's hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man.

The useful arts are reproductions or new combinations by the wit of man, of the same natural benefactors. He no longer waits for favoring gales, but by means of steam, he realizes the fable of Aeolus's bag, and carries the two and thirty winds in the boiler of his boat. To diminish friction, he paves the road with iron bars, and, mounting a coach with a ship-load of men, animals, and merchandise behind him, he darts through the country, from town to town, like an eagle or a swallow through the air. By the aggregate of these aids, how is the face of the world changed, from the era of Noah to that of Napoleon! The private poor man hath cities, ships, canals, bridges, built for him. He goes to the post-office, and the human race run on his errands; to the book-shop, and the human race read and write of all that happens, for him; to the court-house, and nations repair his wrongs. He sets his house upon the road, and the human race go forth every morning, and shovel out the snow, and cut a path for him.

But there is no need of specifying particulars in this class of uses. The catalogue is endless, and the examples so obvious, that I shall leave them to the reader's reflection, with the general remark, that this mercenary benefit is one which has respect to a farther good. A man is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he may work.

Chapter 3

CHAPTER III.

BEAUTY.

A NOBLER want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of Beauty.

The ancient Greeks called the world κοσμος, beauty. Such is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a delight in and for themselves; a pleasure arising from outline, color, motion, and grouping. This seems partly owing to the eye itself. The eye is the best of artists. By the mutual action of its structure and of the laws of light, perspective is produced, which integrates every mass of objects, of what character soever, into a well colored and shaded globe, so that where the particular objects are mean and unaffecting, the landscape which they compose, is round and symmetrical. And as the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful. And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath, like space and time, make all matter gay. Even the corpse has its own beauty. But besides this general grace diffused over nature, almost all the individual forms are agreeable to the eye, as is proved by our endless imitations of some of them, as the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the wheat-ear, the egg, the wings and forms of most birds, the lion's claw, the serpent, the butterfly, sea-shells, flames, clouds, buds, leaves, and the forms of many trees, as the palm.

For better consideration, we may distribute the aspects of Beauty in a threefold manner.

1. First, the simple perception of natural forms is a delight. The influence of the forms and actions in nature, is so needful to man, that, in its lowest functions, it seems to lie on the confines of commodity and beauty. To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself. The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

But in other hours, Nature satisfies by its loveliness, and without any mixture of corporeal benefit. I see the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house, from day-break to sun-rise, with emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations: the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind. How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sun-set and moon-rise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.

Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility in the afternoon, was the charm, last evening, of a January sunset. The western clouds divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes modulated with tints of unspeakable softness; and the air had so much life and sweetness, that it was a pain to come within doors. What was it that nature would say? Was there no meaning in the live repose of the valley behind the mill, and which Homer or Shakspeare could not reform for me in words? The leafless trees become spires of flame in the sunset, with the blue east for their back-ground, and the stars of the dead calices of flowers, and every withered stem and stubble rimed with frost, contribute something to the mute music.

The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country landscape is pleasant only half the year. I please myself with the graces of the winter scenery, and believe that we are as much touched by it as by the genial influences of summer. To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again. The heavens change every moment, and reflect their glory or gloom on the plains beneath. The state of the crop in the surrounding farms alters the expression of the earth from week to week. The succession of native plants in the pastures and roadsides, which makes the silent clock by which time tells the summer hours, will make even the divisions of the day sensible to a keen observer. The tribes of birds and insects, like the plants punctual to their time, follow each other, and the year has room for all. By water-courses, the variety is greater. In July, the blue pontederia or pickerel-weed blooms in large beds in the shallow parts of our pleasant river, and swarms with yellow butterflies in continual motion. Art cannot rival this pomp of purple and gold. Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament.

But this beauty of Nature which is seen and felt as beauty, is the least part. The shows of day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, and the like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality. Go out of the house to see the moon, and 't is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who ever could clutch it? Go forth to find it, and it is gone: 't is only a mirage as you look from the windows of diligence.

2. The presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual element is essential to its perfection. The high and divine beauty which can be loved without effeminacy, is that which is found in combination with the human will. Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural action is graceful. Every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine. We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it. Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution. In proportion to the energy of his thought and will, he takes up the world into himself. "All those things for which men plough, build, or sail, obey virtue;" said Sallust. "The winds and waves," said Gibbon, "are always on the side of the ablest navigators." So are the sun and moon and all the stars 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 becomes 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 its turn, of the active power. Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is Taste. Others have the same love in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art.

The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them all,—that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms,—the totality of nature; which the Italians expressed by defining beauty "il piu nell' uno." Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce. Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man. Thus in art, does nature work through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works.

The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty. This element I call an ultimate end. No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All. But beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must stand as a part, and not as yet the last or highest expression of the final cause of Nature.

Li Po

You ask me, `Why dwell among green mountains?'
I laugh in silence; my soul is quiet.
Peach petals blow on mountain streams
To earths and skies beyond Humankind.



Followers

About Me

My photo
Jennifer believes we live in the garden of Eden and I believe that we are destroying it. Our saving grace is within ourselves, our faith, and our mindfulness. We need to make a conscious effort to respect and preserve all life.