Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 January 1876 — Epigrams by Ralph Waldo Emerson. [ARTICLE]

Epigrams by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

[From Imt’in'i Mew Volume of Xaaayi.j A mam’s action is only a picture-book of his creed. He does alter what he believes. Ths metallic force of primitive words makes the superiority of the remains of the rude ages. , Postrt must be affirmative. It is the piety of intellect. “ Thus saith the Lord” should begin the song. Akt word, every word in language, every circumstance, becomes poetic in the hands of a higher thought. To the poet the world is virgin soil; all is practicable; the men are ready for virtue; It is always time to do right As the bird alights on the bough, then plunges into the air again, so the thoughts of God pause but for a moment In any form. Ins prayers of nations are rhythmic—have iterations and alliterations, like the marriage service and burial service in our liturgies. The poet discovers that what men value as substances have a higher value as symbols; that nature is the immense shadow oilman. I require that the poem should impress me, so that affer I have shut the book it shall recall me to itself, or that passages should. Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the tiling; to pass the brute body and search the life and reason which causes it to exist. Is not poetry the little chamber in the brain where is generated the explosive force which, by gentle shocks, sets in action the intellectual world? . A symbol always stimulates the intollect; therefore is poetry ever the best reading. The very design of imagination is to domesticate us in another, (in a celestial nature. Rhyme, being a kind of music, sharps this advantage with music, that it has a privilege of” speaking truth, which all Philistia is unable to challenge. Music is the poor man’s Parnassus.

There is no choice of words for him who clearly sees the truth. That provides him with the best words. If your subject do not appear to you the flower of the world at this moment, you have not rightly chosen.it. ' The impressions on the imagination make the great days of life; the book, the landscape, or the personality which did not stay on the surface of the eye or ear, but penetrated to the inward sense, agitates us and is not forgotten. Outside of the nursery the beginning of literature is the prayers of the people, and they are always hymns, poetic—the mind allowing itself range, and therewith is«ver a corresponding freedom in the style which becomes lyrical. The act of imagination is ever attended by pure delight. It infuses a certain volatility and intoxication into all nature. It has a flute which sets the atoms of our frame in a dance. Our indeterminate size is a delicious secret which it reveals to us. We must learn the homely laws of fire and water; we must feed, wash, plant, build. These are the ends of necessity, and first in the order of nature. Poverty, frost, famine, disease, debt, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to common sense.

Nature is the true idealist. When •he serves us best; when, on rare days, she speaks to the imagination, we feel that the huge heaven and earth are but a web drawn around us; that the light, skies and mountains are but the painted vicissitudes of the soul. Man runs about restless and in pain when his condition or the objects about him do not fuily match his thought. He wishes to be rich, to be old, to be young, that things may obey him. In the ocean, in fire, in the sky, in the forest he finds facts adequate and as large as he. The test, or measure, of poetic genius is tlie power to read the poetry of affairs —to fuse the circumstance of to-day; not to use Scott’s antique superstitions, or Shakespeare’s, but to convert those of the nineteenth century, and of the existing nations, into universal symbols. Shadows please us as still finer rhymes. Architecture gfves the like pleasure by the of equal parts in a colonnade, in a row of windows pr in wings; gardens by the symmetric contrasts of the beds and walks. In society you have this figure in a bridal company, where a choir of white-robed qiaidens gives the charm of living statues; in a funeral Procession, where all wear black; in a regiment of soldiers in uniform. Imagination is central; fancy is superficial. Fancy relates to surface, in which a great part of life lies. The lover is rightly said to fancy the hair, eyes, complexion of the maid. Fancy is a willful, Imagination a spontaneous, act; fancy, a play as with dolls and puppets which we choose to call men and women; imagination, a perception and affirming of a real relation between a thought and some material fact. Fancy amuses; imagination expands and exalts us. In dreams we are true poets; we create the persons of the drama; we give them appropriate figures, laces, costume; they are perfect in their organs, attitude, manners; moreover, they speak after their own characters, not ours; they speak to us, and we listen with surprise to what they say. Indeed, 1 doubt if the best poet has yet written any five-act play that can compare in thoroughness ot invention with this unwritten play in fifty acts, composed by the dullest snorer on the floor of the watchhouse.