Discussion on Emerson's Creations

SEYD melted the days like cups of pearl,Served high and low, the lord and churl,Loved harebells nodding on a rock,A cabin hung with curling smoke,Ring of axe or hum of wheelOr gleam which use can paint on steel,And huts and tents; nor loved he lessStately lords in palaces,Princely women hard to please,Fenced by form and ceremony,Decked by courtly rites and dressAnd etiquette of gentilesse.But when the mate of the snow and wind,He left each civil scale behind:Him wood-gods fed with honey wildAnd of his memory beguiled.In caves and hollow trees he creptAnd near the wolf and panther slept.He stood before the tumbling mainWith joy too tense for sober brain;He shared…

OUR American people cannot be taxed with slowness in performance or in praising their performance. The earth is shaken by our engineries. We are feeling our youth and nerve and bone. We have the power of territory and of seacoast, and know the use of these. We count our census, we read our growing valuations, we survey our map, which becomes old in a year or two. Our eyes run approvingly along the lengthened lines of railroad and telegraph. We have gone nearest to the Pole. We have discovered the Antarctic continent. We interfere in Central and South America, at Canton and in Japan; we are adding to an already…

O DAY of days when we can read!The reader and the book, – either without the other is naught.THAT book is good Which puts me in a working mood.Unless to Thought be added Will Apollo is an imbecile.BOOKS IT is easy to accuse books, and bad ones are easily found ; and the best are but records, and not the things recorded ; and certainly there is dilettanteism enough, and books that are merely neutral and do nothing for us. In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates says : ” The ship-master walks in a modest garb near the sea, after bringing his passengers from Aegina or from Pontus; not thinking he has…

To these menThe landscape is an armory of powers,Which, one by one, they know to draw and use.They harness beast, bird, insect, to their work;They prove the virtues of each bed of rock,And, like the chemist mid his loaded jars,Draw from each stratum its adapted useTo drug their crops or weapon their arts withal.They turn the frost upon their chemic heap,They set the wind to winnow pulse and grain,They thank the spring-flood for its fertile slime,And on cheap summit-levels of the snowSlide with the sledge to inaccessible woodsO’er meadows bottomless. So, year by year,They fight the elements with elements,And by the order in the field discloseThe order regnant in the…

We flee away from cities, but we bringThe best of cities with us, these learned classifiers,Men knowing what they seek, armed eyes of experts.We praise the guide, we praise the forest life:But will we sacrifice our dear-bought loreOf books and arts and trained experiment,Or count the Sioux a match for Agassiz ?O no, not we! . . . …. Witness the mute all hailThe joyful traveller gives, when on the vergeOf craggy Indian wilderness he hearsFrom a log cabin stream Beethoven’s notesOn the piano, played with master’s hand.Well done! ‘ he cries; ‘ the bear is kept at bay,The lynx, the rattlesnake, the flood, the fire:All the fierce enemies, ague,…