Page:Henry Mulford Tichenor - A Guide to Emerson (1923).djvu/35

 32 authentic effects of the true fire through every one of its million disguises."

Emerson, in his Essay on Love, calls it "the passion" that "rebuilds the world for youth." It is that which "makes all things alive and significant. Nature grows conscious. Every bird on the boughs of the tree sings now to his heart and soulBehold there in the wood the fine madman! He is a palace of sweet sounds and sights; he dilates; he is twice a man; he walks with arms akimbo; he soliloquises; he accosts the grass and trees; he feels the blood of the violet, the clover, and the lily in his veins; and he talks with the brook that wets his footThe lover cannot paint his maiden to his fancy poor and solitary. Like a tree in flower, so much soft, budding, informing loveliness is society for itself, and she teaches his eye why Beauty was pictured with Loves and Graces attending her steps. Her existence makes the world rich. Though she excludes all other persons from his attention as cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him by carrying out her own being into somewhat impersonal, large, mundane, so that the maiden stands to him for a representative of all select things and virtues. For that reason the lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to her mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds."