Self-Reliance & Other Essays

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

We have the same interest in condition and character. We honor the rich, because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us. So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self. All literature writes the character of the wise man. Books, monuments, pictures, conversation, are portraits in which he finds the lineaments he is forming. The silent and the eloquent

allusions

laudatory

commend...

firmament.

abbreviate

proxy,

graybeards

grub,

genus;

“tongue on the balance of expression,”

votaries

convulsive

draughtsman

Because a profound nature awakens in us by its actions and words, by its very looks and manners, the same power and beauty that a gallery of sculpture, or of pictures, addresses.