The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, 2d series

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Houghton, Mifflin, 1903
 

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Page 257 - We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
Page 7 - The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful ; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe.
Page 334 - Great is the art, Great be the manners, of the bard. He shall not his brain encumber With the coil of rhythm and number; But, leaving rule and pale forethought, He shall aye climb For his rhyme. "Pass in, pass in," the angels say, "In to the upper doors, Nor count compartments of the floors, But mount to paradise By the stairway of surprise.
Page 84 - I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think. I observe that difference, and shall observe it One day I shall know the value and law of this discrepance.
Page 25 - Over everything stands its daemon or soul, and, as the form of the thing is reflected by the eye, so the soul of the thing is reflected by a melody. The sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed, pre-exist, or super-exist, in pre-cantations, which sail like odors in the air, and when any man goes by with an ear sufficiently fine, he overhears them and endeavors to write down the notes without diluting or depraving them.
Page 6 - The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart.
Page 173 - He who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royai man.
Page 199 - In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born : that they are not superior to the citizen : that every one of them was once the act of a single man : every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case : that they all are imitable, all alterable ; we may make as good ; we may make better.
Page 42 - And this is the reward ; that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome to thy invulnerable essence.
Page 162 - The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him. When the waters are at level, then my goods pass to him, and his to me. ' All his are mine, all mine his. I say to him, How can you give me this pot of oil or this flagon of wine when all your oil and wine is mine, which belief of mine this gift seems to deny ? Hence the fitness of beautiful, not useful things, for gifts.

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