Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile. Emerson is saying that if stars were to come out one every 1000 years, then we, the human race, would appreciate them a lot more than we do now. Because we see them all the time they have become mundane, common place for us. When they announce that a solar eclipse is going to happen or you see a shooting star, we get excited about that because they don't happen very often. But if they were an everyday thing then no one would think anything of it.
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit . To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population. I think that Emerson is saying that when we have a bad day or something happens that isn't good, nature feels what we feel almost. We don't appreciate it as much anymore.
1 comment:
B-Will!
We blogged on the same quote... I really liked this one. I basically said the same thing as you, that humans have begun to forget about the beauty of things in our everyday life. Because we see the starts all the time, it's like they're not there anymore. This is not a good thing, because what if one day they were gone? What would happen then? I wish more people appreciated natural beauty, because there is nothing cooler than watching a sunset or sitting under the stars for a while. I like your second quote as well. Nature is in tune with our feelings and it would do us some good to return the favor. We can learn things from Nature that we'd never learn anywhere else in life.
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