Emerson - "Over me soared the eternal sky"

Click the image to send this as an ecard.

Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird;--
Beauty through my senses stole;... Read More
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

- Emerson 1834 [1839]

The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Modern Library Classics)

Ralph Waldo Emerson - prayer as glad conspiring reception

Not thanks, not prayer seem quite the highest or truest name for our communications with the Infinite, - but glad conspiring reception, reception that becomes giving in its turn, as the receiver is only the All-Giver in part and in infancy. I cannot, nor can any man, speak precisely of things so sublime, but it seems to me the wit of man (his strength, his grace, his art) is the grace and presence of God. It is beyond explanation. When all is said and done, the rapt saint is found the only logician. Not exhortation, not argument becomes our lips, but paeans of joy and praise...It is God in us which checks the language of petition by a grander thought. In the bottom of the heart it is said: "I am, by me, O Child! this fair body and world of thine stands and grows. I am; all things are mine; and all mine are thine.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from this Journal, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Modern Library Classics)

Emerson, from "Gifts"

Flowers and fruits are always fit presents: flowers
because they are a proud assertion that a
ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Gifts"

"Love" by Ralph Waldo Emerson

LOVE.

Love on his errand bound to go
Can swim the flood and wade through snow,
Where way is none, ‘t will creep and wind
And eat through Alps its home to find.

Hafiz and Emerson (a translation by Emerson?)

“FROM HAFIZ”–a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

"FROM HAFIZ."

I said to the heaven that glowed above,
O hide yon sun-filled zone,
Hide all the stars you boast;
For, in the world of love
And estimation true,
The heaped-up harvest of the moon
Is worth one barley-corn at most,
The Pleiads’ sheaf but two.