THE POWER OF NATURAL BEAUTY.
By Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“The Sage of Concord,” as Mr. Emerson was called, expresses the estimate the American public placed upon his writings. His profound thought and originality are unquestioned. To these grand qualities he added a poetic imagination which diffused a fine glow over all his productions.
Mr. Emerson was born in Boston in 1803, graduated from Harvard College in 1821, and entered the ministry of the Unitarian Church, from which, however, he shortly resigned, and soon devoted himself to literary pursuits. His works have a high reputation among scholars and speculative thinkers. His style is singularly terse and at times almost abrupt, but his thoughts are masterly and striking. He died in 1882.
Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural action is graceful. Every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine. We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.
Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do; but he is entitled to the world by his constitution. In proportion to the energy of his thought and will, he takes up the world into himself. “All those things for which men plough, build, or sail, obey virtue;” said an ancient historian. “The winds and waves,” said Gibbon, “are always on the side of the ablest navigators.” So are the sun and moon and all the stars of heaven.
When a noble act is done—perchance in a scene of great natural beauty; when Leonides and his three hundred martyrs consume one day in dying, and the sun and moon come each and look at them once in the steep defile of Thermopylæ; when Arnold Winkelreid, in the high Alps, under the shadow of the avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf of Austrian spears to break the line for his comrades; are not these heroes entitled to add the beauty of the scene to the beauty of the deed? When the bark of Columbus nears the shore of America;—before it the beach lined with savages, fleeing out of all their huts of cane; the sea behind; and the purple mountains of the Indian Archipelago around, can we separate the man from the living picture? Does not the New World clothe his form with her palm groves and savannahs as fit drapery?
Ever does natural beauty steal in like air, and envelop great actions. When Sir Harry Vane was dragged up the Tower-hill sitting on a sled, to suffer death, as the champion of the English laws, one of the multitude cried out to him, “You never sate on so glorious a seat.” Charles II., to intimidate the citizens of London, caused the patriot Lord Russel to be drawn in an open coach through the principal streets of the city, on his way to the scaffold. “But,” to use the simple narrative of his biographer, “the multitude imagined they saw liberty and virtue sitting by his side.”