Understand me when I say, I love you, it is your genius & not you. I like man, but not men. The genius of humanity is very easily & accurately to be made out by the poet-mind, but it is not in Miss Nancy nor in Adoniram with any sufficiency. ”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson [from his journals, March 24, 1846], in EMERSON IN HIS JOURNALS
, selected and edited by Joel Porte, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachsetts) - London (England), 1982.
, selected and edited by Joel Porte, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachsetts) - London (England), 1982.
From childhood's hour I have not been
ReplyDeleteAs others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then- in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life- was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.