Ralph Waldo Emerson by Oliver Wendell Holmes
page 80 of 449 (17%)
page 80 of 449 (17%)
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Nature.".
In the "Rhodora" the flower is made to answer that "Beauty is its own excuse for being." In this Essay the beauty of the flower is not enough, but it must excuse itself for being, mainly as the symbol of something higher and deeper than itself. He passes next to a consideration of _Language_. Words are signs of natural facts, particular material facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts, and Nature is the symbol of spirit. Without going very profoundly into the subject, he gives some hints as to the mode in which languages are formed,--whence words are derived, how they become transformed and worn out. But they come at first fresh from Nature. "A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that always a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories." From this he argues that country life is a great advantage to a powerful mind, inasmuch as it furnishes a greater number of these material images. They cannot be summoned at will, but they present themselves when great exigencies call for them. "The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after year, |
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