. . .
Your obliged friend and servant, R. WALDO EMERSON.
And later:--
CONCORD, January 20, 1838.
You make me heartily ashamed, my kind friend, by the excess of your
praise of two such little books. I could not possibly recognize
anything of me in your glowing and pictorial words. So I take it for
granted that as a true artist you have the beauty-making eye, which
transfigures the landscape and the heads it looks upon, and can read
poetry out of dull prose. I am not the less glad to have been the
occasion to you of pleasant thoughts, and I delight in the genuine
admiration you express of that ideal beauty which haunts us ever and
makes actual life look sometimes like the coarsest caricature. I like
very well what you say of Flaxman, and shall give him the greater
heed. And indeed who can see the works of a great artist without
feeling that not so much the private as the common wealth is by him
indicated. I think the true soul--humble, rapt, conspiring with all,
regards all souls as its lieutenants and proxies--itself in another
place--and saith of the Parthenon, of the picture, of the poem,--It is
also my work. I can never quarrel with your state of mind concerning
original attempts in your own art. I admire it rather. And I am pained
to think of the grievous resistance which your genius has been so long
tasked to overcome, of bodily suffering.
You ask for my lectures. I wish they were fit to send. They should go
immediately to Salem if they were.
Pages:
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182