EMERSON
In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue.
I have scarce a daydream on which the breadth of the pines has not blown, and their shadows waved.
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between the man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right. Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance.
The passions rebuild the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant. Nature grows conscious. Every bird on the boughs of the tree sings now to his heart and soul. The notes are almost articulate. The clouds have faces as he looks on them. The trees of the forest, the waving grass and the peeping flowers have grown intelligent; and he almost fears to trust them with the secret which they seem to invite. Yet nature soothes and sympathizes. In the green solitude he finds a dearer home than with men.
The muse herself betrays her son, and enhances the gifts of wealth and well-born beauty by a radiation out of the air, and clouds, and forests that skirt the road- a certain haughty favor, as if from patrician genii to patricians, a kind of aristocracy in nature, a prince of power of the air.
Besides the poets' privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power from which he can draw, unlocking, at all risk, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him. This dream power transcends all limits and privacy and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.
