Beauty
拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生 / Ralph Waldo Emerson
A nobler want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of Beauty.
The ancient Greeks called the world Koouos, beauty. Such is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a delight in and for themselves; a pleasure arising from outline, color, motion, and grouping. This seems partly owing to the eye itself. The eye is the best of artists. By the mutual action of its structure and of the laws of light, perspective is produced, which integrates every mass of objects, of what character soever, into a well colored and shaded globe, so that where the particular objects are mean and unaffecting, the landscape which they compose is round and symmetrical. And as the eye is the best composer, so light is the f?irst of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful. And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of inf?initude which it has, like space and time, make all matter gay. Even the corpse has its own beauty. But besides this general grace diffused over nature, almost all the individual forms are agreeable to the eye, as is proved by our endless imitations of some of them, as the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the wheat-ear, the egg, the wings and forms of most birds, the lion’s claw, the serpent, the butterf?ly, sea-shells, f?lames, clouds, buds, leaves, and the forms of many trees, as the palm.
For better consideration, we may distribute the aspects of Beauty in a threefold manner.
1. F?irst, the simple perception of natural forms is a delight. The inf?luence of the forms and actions in nature is so needful to man, that, in its lowest functions, it seems to lie on the conf?ines of commodity and beauty. To the body and mind, which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din. and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he f?inds himself. The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never f?ired, so long as we can see far enough.
But in other hours, Nature satisf?ies by its loveliness, and without any mixture of corporeal benef?it. I see the spectacle of morning from the hilltop over against my house, from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud f?loat like f?ishes in the sea of crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations; the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind. How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sunset and moon-rise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.
Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility in the afternoon, was the charm, last evening, of a January sunset. The western clouds divided and subdivided themselves into pink f?lakes modulated with tints of unspeakable softness, and the air had so much life and sweetness that it was a pain to come within doors. What was it that nature would say? Was there no meaning in the live repose of the valley behind the mill, and which Homer or Shakespeare could not re-form for me in words? The leaf?less tress become spires of f?lame in the sunset, with the blue cast for their background, and the stars of the dead calices of f?lowers, and every withered stem and stubble rimed with frost, contribute something to the mute music.
The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country landscape is pleasant only half the year. I please myself with the graces of the winter scenery, and believe that we are as much touched by it as by the genial inf?luences of summer. To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same f?ield, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again. The heavens change every moment, and ref?lect their glory or gloom on the plains beneath. The state of the crop in the surrounding farms alters the expression of the earth from week to week. The succession of native plants in the pastures and: roadsides, which makes the silent clock by which time tells the summer hours, will make even the divisions of the day sensible to a keen observer. The tribes of birds and insects, like the plants punctual to their time, follow each other, and the year has room for all. By watercourses, the variety is greater. In July, the blue pontederia or pickerel-weed blooms in large beds in the shallow ports of our pleasant river, and swarms with yellow butterf?lies in continual motion. Art cannot rival this pomp of purple and gold. Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament.
But this beauty of Nature which is seen and felt as beauty, is the least part. The shows of day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, and the like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality. Go out of the house to see the moon, and ’tis mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who ever could clutch it? Go forth to f?ind it, and it is gone; 'tis only a mirage as you look from the windows of diligence.