Essays: The poet. Experience. Character. Manners. Gifts. Nature. Politics. Nominalist and realist. New England reformersHoughton, Mifflin, 1876 |
Common terms and phrases
action animal Antinomians appear Aristocracy beauty begin to hope believe Brook Farm character church conversation Dæmon divine earth Emerson England essay Eumenides experience expression eyes fact faith fancy fashion feel flowers force Fruitlands genius gentleman gift give heart heaven Heracleitus hour individual intellect James Naylor John Sterling labor Lectures and Biographical live look Lord man's manners ment mind moral morning natura naturans nature never NOMINALIST numbers object party passage persons philosophy phrenology Plato Plotinus Plutarch Poems poet poetry politics poor present Proclus Pythagoras RALPH WALDO EMERSON reform religion rich Samuel Hoar secret seems sense sentiment society soul speak spirit stand stars symbol talent thee things thou thought tion truth universal virtue whilst whole wise wonder words write
Popular passages
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 34 - Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional ; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.
Page 6 - The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance,2 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 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 334 - I have just been conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible, that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.
Page 162 - We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecoming. Some violence I think is done, some degradation borne, when I rejoice or grieve at a gift. I am sorry when my independence is invaded, or when a gift comes from such as do not know my spirit, and so the act is not supported...
Page 6 - Every man should be so much an artist, that he could report in conversation what had befallen him. Yet, in our experience, the rays or appulses have sufficient force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick, and compel the reproduction of themselves in speech.
Page 161 - But it is a cold lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy me something which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's. This is fit for kings, and rich men who represent kings, and a false state of property, to make presents of gold and silver stuffs, as a kind of symbolical sin-offering, or payment of blackmail.
Page 208 - ... idea, was also relatively right. But our institutions, though in coincidence with the spirit of the age, have not any exemption from the practical defects which have discredited other forms. Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word politic, which now for ages has signified cunning, intimating that the State is a trick ? The same benign necessity and the same practical abuse appear...
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.