Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves. Our
dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole
world is doing things. We are turning in that vortex; yet within us is
silent observation, the speculative eye before which all passes, which
bridges the distances and compares the combatants. On this side of his
genius Emerson broke away from all conditions of age or country and
represented nothing except intelligence itself.
There was another element in Emerson, curiously combined with
transcendentalism, namely, his love and respect for Nature. Nature,
for the transcendentalist, is precious because it is his own work, a
mirror in which he looks at himself and says (like a poet relishing
his own verses), "What a genius I am! Who would have thought there was
such stuff in me?" And the philosophical egotist finds in his doctrine
a ready explanation of whatever beauty and commodity nature actually
has. No wonder, he says to himself, that nature is sympathetic, since
I made it. And such a view, one-sided and even fatuous as it may be,
undoubtedly sharpens the vision of a poet and a moralist to all that
is inspiriting and symbolic in the natural world. Emerson was
particularly ingenious and clear-sighted in feeling the spiritual uses
of fellowship with the elements.
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