Discussion on Emerson's Creations

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…

For whom the Muses smile upon,And touch with soft persuasion,His words, like a storm-wind, can bringTerror and beauty on their wing;In his every syllableLurketh nature veritable;And though he speak in midnight dark, –In heaven no star, on earth no spark, –Yet before the listener’s eyeSwims the world in ecstasy,The forest waves, the morning breaks,The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes,Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons beAnd life pulsates in rock or tree. ELOQUENCE IT is the doctrine of the popular music-masters that whoever can speak can sing. So probably every man is eloquent once in his life. Our temperaments differ in capacity of heat, or, we boil at different degrees. One man…

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,…