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05 - Love - Essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson · The Philosophy Insights Collection

• Love I was as a gem concealed me. My burning bray revealed Koran. Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfillments. Each of its joys ripens into a new want nature uncontainable, flowing forelooking in the first sentiment of kindness anticipates already a benevolence which shall lose all particular regards in its general light. The introduction to this felicity is in a private and tender relation of one to one, which is the enchantment of human life, which, like a certain divine rage and enthusiasm, seizes on man at one period, and works of revolution in his mind and body, unites him to his race, pledges him to the domestic and civic relations, carries him with new sympathy into nature, enhances the power of the senses, opens the imagination, adds to his character heroic and sacred attributes, establishes marriage, and gives permanence to human society. The natural association of the sentiment of love with the heyday of the blood seems to require that in order to portray it in vivid tints, which every youth had made should confess to be true to their throbbing experience, one must not be too old. The delicious fancies of youth reject the least savor of the mature philosophy, as chilling with age and pedantry their purple bloom. And therefore I know I incur the imputation of unnecessary hardness and stoicism from those who compose the court and parliament of love. But from these formidable censors I shall appeal to my seniors. For it is to be considered that this passion of which we speak, though it begin with the young, yet for sakes not the old, or rather suffers no one who is truly its servants to grow old, but makes the aged participators of it not less than the tender maiden, though in a different and nobler sort. For it is a fire that, kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, close and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world, in all nature, with its generous flames. It matters not, therefore, whether we attempt to describe the passion at twenty, at thirty, or at eighty years. He who paints it at the first period will lose some of its later, he who paints it at the last some of its earlier traits. Only it is to be hoped that by patience and the muses aid, we may attain to that inward view of the law, which shall describe a truth every young and beautiful, so central that it shall commend itself to the eye at whatever angle beholden. And the first condition is that we must leave a too close and lingering adherence to facts, and study the sentiment as it appeared in hope, and not in history. For each man sees his own life defaced and disfigured, as the life of man is not to his imagination. Every man sees over his own experience a certain stain of error, whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal. Let any man go back to those delicious relations which make the beauty of his life, which have given him sincerest, instruction and nourishment, he will shrink and moan alas I know not why, but infinite compunctions embitter in mature life the remembrances of budding joy, and cover every beloved name. Everything is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth, but all is sour if seen as experience. Details are melancholy, The plan is seemly anoble in the actual world, the painful kingdom of time and place, dwell, care and canker and fear. With thought with the ideal is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy round it all the muses seeing, but grief cleaves to names and persons and the partial interests of today and yesterday. The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion which this topic of personal relations usurps in the conversation of society. What do we wish to know of any worthy person, so much as how he has sped in the history of this sentiment? What books in the circulating libraries circulate? How we glow over these novels of passion when the story is told with any spark of truth nature? And what fastens attention in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties. Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet them again, But we see them exchange a glance or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers, we understand them and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover. The earliest demonstrations of complacency and kindness are nature's most winning pictures. It is the dawn of civility and grace. In the course and rustic, the rude village boy teases the girls about the schoolhouse door. But to day he comes running into the entry and meets one fair child disposing her satchel. He holds her books to help her, and instantly it seems to him as if she removed herself from him infinitely and was a sacred precinct aong, the throng of girls he runs rudely enough, but only one distances him, And these two little neighbors, who were so close, just now have learned to respect each other's personality. Or who can avert his eyes from the engaging, half artful, half artless ways of schoolgirls who go into the country shops to buy a skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and talk half an hour about nothing with the broad faced, good natured shop boy in the village. They are on a perfect equality which love delights in, and without any coquetry. The happy, affectionate nature of woman flows out in this pretty gossip. The girls may have little beauty, yet plainly do they establish between them and the good boy the most agreeable, confiding relations. What with their fun and their earnest About Edgar and Jonas and Almirah, and who was invited to the party, and who danced at the dancing school, and when the singing school would begin? Another nothings concerning which the party's could by and by that boy wants a wife, and very truly and heartily will he know where to find a sincere and sweet mate without any risks, such as Milton deplores. As incident to scholars and great men, I have been told that in some public discourses of mine, my reverence for the intellect has made me unjustly cold to the personal relations. But now I almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words. For persons are Love's world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to the power of love, without being tempted to unsay as treasonable to nature, ought, derogatory to the social instincts. For though the celestial rapture falling out of heaven seizes only upon those of tender age, and although a beauty overpowering all analysis or comparison, and putting us quite beside ourselves, we can seldom see after thirty years. Yet the remembrance of these visions outlasts all other remembrances, and is a wreath of flowers on the oldest brows. But here is a strange fact. It may seem to many men, in revising their experience, that they have no fairer page in their life's book than the delicious memory of some passages, wherein affection contrive to give a witchcraft, surpassing the deep attraction to its own truth, to a parcel of accidental and trivial circumstances. Looking backward, they may find that several things which were not the charm have more reality to this groping memory than the charm itself, which embalmed them. But be our experience in particulars what it may. No man ever forgot the visitations of that power to his heart and brain, which created all things anew, which was the dawn in him of music, poetry, and art, which made the face of nature radiant with purple light, the morning and the night, varied enchantments, when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound, and the most trivial circumstance associated with one form is put in the amber of memory, when he became all eye, when one was present at all memory, when one was gone. When the youth becomes a watcher of windows and studious of a glove of veil of ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage, when no place is too solitary and none too silent for him who has richer company and sweeter conversation in his new thoughts than any old friends, though best and purest can give him. For the figures, the motions, the words of the beloved object are not like other images written in water, but, as Plutarch said, enameled in fire, and make the study of midnight. Thou art not gone, being gone, where'er thou art, thou leavest in him thy watchful eyes, in him, thy loving heart. In the noon and the afternoon of life, we still throb at the recollection of days when happiness was not happy enough, but must be drugged with the relish of pain and fear. For he touched the secret of the matter, who said, of love, all other pleasures are not worth its pains. And when the day was not long enough, but the night too must be consumed in keen recollections, when the head boiled all night on the pillow with the generous deed it resolved on, when the moonlight was a pleasing fever, and the stars were letters, and the flowers ciphers, and the air was coined into song, when all business seemed an impertinence, and all the men and women running to and fro in the street's mere pictures. The passion rebuilds 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. Fountain heads and pathless groves, places which pale Passion loves moonlight, walks when all the fowls are safely housed, save bats and owls. A midnight bell, a passing groan. These are the sounds we feed upon. Behold there in the wood, the fine madmen. He is a palace of sweet sounds and sights. He dilates, he is twice a man. He walks with arms akimbo, He soliloquizes, He accosts the grass and the 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 foot. The heats that have opened his perceptions of natural beauty have made him love music. In verse, it is a fact often observed that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under any other circumstances. The like force has the passion over all his nature. It expands the sentiment. It makes the clown gentle, and gives the coward heart into the most pitiful and abject. It will infuse a heart and courage to defy the world. So only it have the countenance of the beloved object in giving him to another. It still more gives him to himself. He is a new man, with new perceptions, new and keener purposes, and a religious solemnity of character and aims. He does not longer appertain to his family and society. He is something, He is a person, He is a soul. And here let us examine a little nearer the nature of that influence which is thus potent over the human youth. Beauty, whose revelation to man we now celebrate, welcome as the sun wherever it pleases to shine, which pleases everybody with it and with themselves, seems sufficient to itself. The lover cannot paint his maiden to his fancy, poor and solitary, like a tree in flower. So much soft, budding and forming 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 extrudes all other persons from his attention as cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him by carrying out her own being into something 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. Her 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. The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who can analyze the nameless charm which glances from one in another face and form? We are touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency when we cannot find whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam points It is destroyed for the imagine nation by any attempt to refer it to organization. Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love known and described in society. But as it seems to me, a quite other and unattainable sphere to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness, to what roses and violence hints and foreshow, we cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like open line dovesnack lusters, hovering an evanescence. Herein it resembles the most excellent things which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use. What else did Jean Pierre Richter signify when he said to music away away, Thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless life I have not found and shall not find. The same fluency may be observed in every work of the plastic arts. The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring want, but demands an active imagination to go with it and to say what it is. In the act of doing, the god or hero of the sculptor is always represented in a transition from that which is representable to the senses to that which is not. Then first it ceases to be a stone. The same remark holds of painting and of poetry. The success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable. Concerning its lander inquires whether it is not to be referred to some purer state of sensation and existence In like manner, personal Beauty is then first charming and itself, when it dissatisfies us with any end, when it becomes a story without an end, when it suggests gleams and visions and not earthly satisfactions, when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness, when he cannot feel his right to it. Though he were Caesar, he cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and the splendors of the sunset. Hans arose to saying, if I love you, what is that to you? We say so because we feel that what we love is not in your will, but above it. It is not you but your radiance. It is that which you know not in yourself, and can never know. This agrees well with that high philosophy of beauty, which the ancient writers delighted in, for they said that the soul of man, embodied here on earth, went roaming up and down in quest of that other world of its own, not of which it came into this, but was soon stupefied by the light of the natural sun, and unable to see any other objects than those of this world, which are but shadows of real things. Therefore the deity sends the glory of youth before the soul, that it may avail itself of beautiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the celestial good and fair. And the man beholding such a person in the female sex, runs to her and finds the highest joy in contemplating the form, movement, and intelligence of this person, because it suggests to him the presence of that which indeed is within the beauty and the cause of the beauty. If, however, from too much conversing with material objects, the soul was gross and misplaced its satisfaction in the body, it reaped nothing but sorrow, body being unable to fulfill the promise which beauty holds out. But if accepting the hint of these visions and suggestions which beauty makes to his mind, the soul passes through the body and fails to admire strokes of character, and the lovers contemplate one another in their discourse and their actions. Then they pass to the true palace of beauty, more and more inflame their love of it, and by this love extinguishing the base affection, as the sun puts out the fire by shining on the hearth, they become pure and hallowed by conversation with that which is in itself excellent, magnanimous, lowly, and just. The lover comes to a warmer love of these nobilities, and a quicker apprehension of them. Then he passes from loving them in one to loving them in all. And so is the one beautiful soul only the door through which he enters to the society of all true and pure souls. In the particular society of his mate, he attains a clearer sight of any spot, any taint which her beauty has contracted from this world, and is able to point it out. And this with mutual joy, that they are now able, without offense, to indicate blemishes and hindrances in each other, and to give to each all help and comfort in curing the same, and beholding in many souls the traits of the divine beauty, and separating in each soul that which is divine from the taint which it has contracted in the world. The lover ascends to the highest beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity. By steps on this ladder of created souls. Something like this had the truly wise tolus of love in all ages. The doctrine is not old, nor is it new. If Plato, Plutarch, and Apelaius taught it, so have Patriarch Angelo and Milton. It awaits a truer unfolding in opposition and rebuke to that subterranean prudence which presides at marriages with words that take hold of the upper world, whilst one eye is prowling in the cellar, so that its gravest discourse has a savor of hands and powdering tubs. Worst, when this sensualism intrudes into the education of young women and withers the hope and affection of human nature, by teaching that marriage signifies nothing but a housewife's thrift, and that woman's life has no other aim. But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only one scene in our play. In the procession of the soul from within outward, it enlarges its circles. Ever, like the pebble thrown into the pond, or the light proceeding from an orb The rays of the soul alight first on things nearest, on every utensil and toy, on nurses and domestics, on the house and yard, and passengers, on the circle of household, acquaintance, on politics and geography, and history, but things are ever grouping themselves according to higher and more interior laws. Neighborhood size, numbers, habits, persons lose degrees. Their power over us cause an effect real affinities, the longing for harmony between the soul and the circumstance. The progressive, idealizing instincts predominate later, and the step backward from the higher to the lower relations is impossible. Thus, even love, which is the deification of persons, must become more impersonal every day. Of this. At first, it gives no hint, little think. The youth and maiden, who are glancing at each other across crowded rooms with eyes so full of mutual intelligence of the precious fruit, long hereafter to proceed from this new quite external stimulus. The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and leaf buds, from exchanging glances that advance to acts of courtesy of gallantry, than to fiery passion, to flighting troth and marriage. Passion beholds its object as a perfect units. The soul is wholly embodied, and the body is wholly and souled. Her pure and elegant blood spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly rots that one might also say her body thought Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens fine. Life with this pair, as no other aim asks no more than Juliet than Romeo. Nights day studies, talents, Kingdom's religion are all contained in this form, full of soul. In this soul which is all form, the lovers delight in endearments, in the vowels of love, in comparisons of their regards. When alone, they solace themselves with the remembered image of the other. Does that other see the same star, the same melting cloud, read the same book, feel the same emotion that now delight me. They try and weigh their affection, and adding up costly advantages, friends, opportunities, properties, exult in discovering that willingly, joyfully they would give all as ransom for the beautiful, the beloved head, not one hair of which shall be harmed. But the lot of humanity is on these children. Danger, sorrow, and pain arrive to them as to all love praise it makes covenance with eternal power, and behalf of this dear mate, the union which is thus affected, and which adds a new value to every atom in nature, for it transmutes every thread throughout the whole web of relation into a golden ray, and bathes the soul in a new and sweeter element. Is yet a temporary state. Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart content. The awful soul that dwells in cl it arouses itself at last from these endearments as toys and puts on the harness and aspires to vast and universal aims. The soul, which is in the soul of each craving a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects, and disproportion in the behavior of the other. Hence arise surprise, expostulation, and pain. Yet that which drew them to each other with signs of loveliness signs of virtue. And these virtues are there, however eclipsed. They appear and reappear, and continue to attract. But the regard changes, quits the sign and attaches to the substance. This repairs the wounded affection. Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation and combination of all possible positions of the parties, to employ all the resources of each and acquaint each with the strength and weakness of the other. For it is the nature and end of this relation that they should represent the human race to each other. All that is in the world, which is or ought to be known, is cunningly wrought into the texture of man of woman. The person loved us to us, fit like manner, has the taste of all in it. The world rolls, the circumstances vary each hour. The angels that inhabit this temple of the body appear at the windows, and the gnomes and vices also by all the virtues, they are united. If there be virtue, all the vices are known. As such, they confess and flee. Their once flaming regard is sobered by time, in either breast and losing in violence, what it gains in extent it becomes a thorough good understanding design each other without complaint to the good offices which man and women are severally appointed to discharge in time and exchange the passion which once could not lose sight of its object, for a cheerful, disengaged furtherance, whether present or absence, of each other's designs. At last they discover that all which at first drew them together, those once sacred features, that magical play of charms, was desiduous at a prospective end, like the scaffolding by which the house was built, and the purification of the intellect and the heart from year to year is the real marriage, foreseen and prepared from the first, and wholly above their consciousness. Looking at these aims with which two persons, a man and a woman, so variously and correlatively gifted, are shot up in one house to spend in the nuptial society forty or fifty years, I do not wonder at the emphasis with which the heart prophesies this crisis from early infancy, at the profuse beauty with which the instincts deck the nuptial bower, and nature and intellect and art emulate each other in the gifts and the melody they bring to the Epithalamian. Thus we are put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere. To the end of increasing virtue and wisdom, we are, by nature observers and thereby learners. That is our permanent state. But we are often made to feel that our affections are but tenths of a knight. Though slowly and with pain, the objects of the affections change as the objects of thought do. There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man and make his happiness dependent on a person or person's. But in health the mind it is presently seen again, its overarching vaults, bright with galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm loves and fears that swept over us. As clouds must lose their finite character and blend with God to attain their own perfection. But we need not fear that we can lose anything by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end that which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations must be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful, and so on forever and of love.