American citizen. [volume] (Canton, Miss.) 1864-1890, 1876-01-22
Epigrams by Ralph Waldo Emerson.


tFrom me sons New Volume of Essays.l
A MANS action is only a picture book
of his creed. He docs alter what he be-
lieves.
THE metallic force of primitive words
makes the superiority of the remains OF
the rude ages.
POETRY must be affirmative. 1t is the
piety of intellect. THUS saith the Lord"
should begin the song.
ANY 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
plungcs into the air again, SD the thoughts
of God pause but for a moment in any
form.
THE prayers of nations are rhythmic
have iterations and alterations, like the
marriage service and burial service ill our
liturgies.
THE poet discovers that what men
value as substances have a higher value
as symbols; that nature is the immense
shadow of man.
! REQUIRE that the poem should i'm
press me, SO that after l have shut the
book it shall recall me to itself, or that
passages should.
POETRY is the perpetual endeavor to ex-
press the spirit of the thing; 10 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 &C.
ton the intellectual world?
A SYMBOL always stimulates the intel
lect; therefore is poetry ever the best read
ing. The very design of imagination is
to domesticate us in another, in a celestial
nature.
RHYME, being kind of music, shares
this advantage with music, that it has a
privilege of speaking truth, which all
Philistia is unable TO challenge. Music
is the poor mans 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 right
ly chosen it.
THE impressions on the Imagination
landscape, or the personality which did
not stay on the surface of the eye or ear,
but penetrated to the inv ard 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 Herewith
is ever a corresponding freedom in the
style which becomes lyrical.
The act of Imagination is ever attended
by pure delight. 1t infuscs certain
volatility and intoxication into all nature.
1t has flute which sets the atoms of our
frame in a dance. Our indeterminatc
size is . 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 idcalist. When
she serves us best; when, on rare days,
she speaks TO the imagination, we feel that
the huge heaven and earth are but q web
drawn around us; that the light, skies
and mountains are but the painted vicis-
STUDIES of the soul.
MAN runs about restless and in pain
when his condition or the objects about
him do not fully 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 the power to read the poetry of affairs
to fuse the circumstance of to-day; not
to use SCOTS antique superstitiOns, or
Shakespcare'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 gives the like
pleasure by the repetition of equal parts in
a colonnade, in row of windows or in
wings; gardens by the symmetric con.
trasts of the beds and walks. In society
you have this figure in a bridal company,
where q choir of white-rubed maidcns
gives the charm of living statues; in a
funeral procession, where all wear black
in q regiment OF soldiers in uniform.
IMAGINATION is central; fancy is super
fetal. Fancy relates 70 surface, in which
a great part of life lies. The lover ID
rightly said to fancy the hair, eyes, CON-
plexiOn of the maid. Fancy is willful,
Imagination spontaneous, act; fancy, a
play as with dolls and puppets which we
choose to cal! men and women; magma
ton, perception and affirming of real
relation between thought and some ma
tcrial 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, faces. costume; they
are perfect in their organs, attitude, man.
ners moreover, they speak after their own
characters, not ours they speak to us, and
we listen with surprise to what they say,
Indeed, doubt if the best poet has yet
written any five-act play that can compare
in thoroughness of invention with this un.
written play in fifty acts, composed by the