Page:Henry Mulford Tichenor - A Guide to Emerson (1923).djvu/55

 52 with the insane, and must humor them; then conversation dies out.

"Once I took such delight in Montaigne that I thought I should not need any other book; before that, in Shakespeare; then in Plutarch; then in Plotinus; at one time in Bacon; afterwards in Goethe; even in Bettine; but now I turn the pages of either of them languidly, whilst I still cherish their genius. …

"The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways by which he has come by it. Like a bird which alights nowhere, but hops perpetually from bough to bough, is the Power which abides in no man and in no woman, but for a moment speaks from this one and for another moment from that one. … The results of life are uncalculated and incalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. … When I converse with a profound mind, or if at any time being alone I have good thoughts, I do not at once arrive at satisfactions, as, when being thirsty, I drink water, or go to the fire, being cold; no! but I am at first apprised of my vicinity to a new and excellent region of life. By persisting to read or think, this region gives further sign of itself, as it were in flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and repose, as if the cloudy that covered it parted at intervals, and showed the approaching traveler the inland mountains, with the tranquil eternal