A little bit of literature

“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 influences of summer. To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again. The heavens change every moment, and reflect 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 water-courses, the variety is greater. In July, the blue pontederia or pickerel-weed blooms in large beds in the shallow parts of our pleasant river, and swarms with yellow butterflies 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.”

Vocabulary build-up

The transitive verb behold means “to see, look upon, or gaze at; perceive by sight or have the power to perceive by sight.”

The noun gloom means “an atmosphere of melancholy or depression; a state of melancholy or depression; despondency.” Close synonyms are “desolation”, “unhappiness”, “downheartedness”, and “dejection.”

Comments

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was a famous lecturer, philosopher, poet, and writer. He led the New England Transcendentalist Movement of the 1800s, a philosophy that loosely bound together authors by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of humanity, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths. Emerson was the son of the Reverend William Emerson, from whom he inherited the profession of divinity, which had attracted all his ancestors in direct line from Puritan days. After years working as a preacher, Emerson left the church. He was in search of a more certain proof of the existence of God. He then traveled to Europe in order to study and meet some prominent thinkers, such as Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth. When he returned to Massachusetts, in the 1830s, he began to write “Nature” and established himself as a popular and influential lecturer. This is when he became an independent literary man. “Nature” declared that understanding nature was the key to understanding God and reality, and laid the groundwork for transcendentalism. His legacy of boldly questioning the doctrine of his day and connecting with nature will resonate with today’s readers in search of meaning and enlightenment. Emerson also mentored Henry David Thoreau, and was a pioneer of multiculturalism in American writing.