Resumo de Essays: First Series (1841)*first Part*

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet tothe same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right ofreason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he maythink; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has be-fallen anyman, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party toall that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent. Of the works of this mind history is the record. But the thought isalways prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind aslaws. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. There is a relation betweenthe hours of our life and the centuries of time. The obscure consciousness ofthis fact is the light of all our day, the claim of claims; the plea foreducation, for justice, for charity, the foundation of friendship and love, andof the heroism and grandeur which belong to acts of self-reliance. We have the same interest in condition and character. All literaturewrites the character of the wise man. Praise is looked, homage tendered, loveflows from mute nature, from the mountains and the lights of the firmament. Thestudent is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own lifethe text, and books the commentary. The world exists for the education of each man. The instinct of themind, the purpose of nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the signalnarrations of history. The better for him. Belzoni digs and measures in themummy-pits and pyramids of Thebes, until he can see the end of the differencebetween the monstrous work and himself. We put ourselves into the place andstate of the builder. We remember the forest-dwellers, the first temples, theadherence to the first type, and the decoration of it as the wealth of thenation increased; the value which is given to wood by carving led to thecarving over the whole mountain of stone of a cathedral. We have the sufficientreason. The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of causes, whichneglects surface differences. For the eye is fastened on the life, and slightsthe circumstance. Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpillar,through the grub, through the egg, the constant individual; through countlessindividuals, the fixed species; through many species, the genus; through allgenera, the steadfast type; through all the kingdoms of organized life, theeternal unity. How many are the acts of one man in which we recognize the samecharacter! Observe the sources of our information in respect to the Greekgenius. I have seen the head of an old sachem of the forest, which at oncereminded the eye of a bald mountain summit, and the furrows of the browsuggested the strata of the rock. There are men whose manners have the same essentialsplendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, andthe remains of the earliest Greek art. And there are compositions of the samestrain to be found in the books of all ages. It is the spirit and not the factthat is identical. Santa Croce and the Dome of St. Strasburg Cathedral is amaterial counterpart of the soul of Erwin of Steinbach. The true poem is thepoet's mind; the true ship is the ship-builder. In the man, could we lay himopen, we should see the reason for the last flourish and tendril of his work;as every spine and tint in the sea-shell preexist in the secreting organs ofthe fish. The whole of heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. The man who hasseen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight has been present likean archangel at the creation of light and of the world. The Doric temple preservesthe semblance of the wooden cabin in which the Dorian dwelt. The Indian andEgyptian temples still betray the mounds and subterranean houses of theirforefathers. "The custom of making houses and tombs in the livingrock," says Heeren, in his Researches on the Ethiopians, "determinedvery naturally the principal character of the Nubian Egyptiaarchitecture tothe colossal form which it assumed. In the woods in a winter afternoon one willsee as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which the Gothiccathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bareand crossing branches of the forest. As the Persian imitated in the slendershafts and capitals of his architecture the stem and flower of the lotus andpalm, so the Persian court in its magnificent era never gave over the nomadismof its barbarous tribes, but travelled from Ecbatana, where the spring wasspent, to Susa in summer, and to Babylon for the winter.

Resumos Relacionados