Essays, Second Series | Page 3

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This Project Gutenberg Etext Prepared by Tony Adam
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Essays, Second Series
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

THE POET.
A moody child and wildly wise Pursued the game with joyful eyes,
Which chose, like meteors, their way, And rived the dark with private
ray: They overleapt the horizon's edge, Searched with Apollo's
privilege; Through man, and woman, and sea, and star Saw the dance
of nature forward far; Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times
Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.
Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us
young, And always keep us so.
I. THE POET.
Those who are esteemed umpires of taste are often persons who have
acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have
an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they
are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures,
you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as
if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the
rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of
rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form, which
is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness
of the doctrine of beauty as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that
men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form
upon soul. There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We were
put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan to be carried about; but
there is no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the organ, much
less is the latter the germination of the former. So in regard to other
forms, the intellectual men do not believe in any essential dependence
of the material world on thought and volition. Theologians think it a
pretty air-castle to talk of the Spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, of
a city or a contract, but they prefer to come again to the solid