No More Learning

Who knows the curious mystery of the eyesight? The other senses
corroborate themselves, but this is removed from any proof but its own, and
foreruns the identities of the spiritual world. A single glance of it mocks
all the investigations of man, and all the instruments and books of the
earth, and all reasoning. What is marvellous? what is unlikely? what is
impossible or baseless or vague? after you have once just opened the space
of a peachpit, and given audience to far and near and to the sunset, and
had all things enter with electric swiftness, softly and duly, without
confusion or jostling or jam.

The land and sea, the animals, fishes, and birds, the sky of heaven and the
orbs, the forests, mountains, and rivers, are not small themes: but folks
expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which
always attach to dumb real objects,--they expect him to indicate the path
between reality and their souls. Men and women perceive the beauty well
enough--probably as well as he. The passionate tenacity of hunters,
woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, the
love of healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of
horses, the passion for light and the open air, all is an old varied sign
of the unfailing perception of beauty, and of a residence of the poetic, in
outdoor people. They can never be assisted by poets to perceive: some may,
but they never can. The poetic quality is not marshalled in rhyme or
uniformity, or abstract addresses to things, nor in melancholy complaints
or good precepts, but is the life of these and much else, and is in the
soul. The profit of rhyme is that it drops seeds of a sweeter and more
luxuriant rhyme; and of uniformity, that it conveys itself into its own
roots in the ground out of sight. The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems
show the free growth of metrical laws, and bud from them as unerringly and
loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the
shapes of chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears, and shed the perfume
impalpable to form. The fluency and ornaments of the finest poems or music
or orations or recitations are not independent, but dependent.
All beauty
comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain. If the greatnesses are in
conjunction in a man or woman, it is enough--the fact will prevail through
the universe: but the gaggery and gilt of a million years will not prevail.
Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost. This is what
you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give
alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your
income and labour to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have
patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing
known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful
uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families,
read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,
re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book,
dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a
great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the
silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and
in every motion and joint of your body. The poet shall not spend his time
in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed
and manured: others may not know it, but he shall. He shall go directly to
the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches,
and shall master all attachment.

The known universe has one complete lover, and that is the greatest poet.
He consumes an eternal passion, and is indifferent which chance happens,
and which possible contingency of fortune or misfortune, and persuades
daily and hourly his delicious pay. What balks or breaks others is fuel for
his burning progress to contact and amorous joy. Other proportions of the
reception of pleasure dwindle to nothing to his proportions. All expected
from heaven or from the highest he is rapport with in the sight of the
daybreak, or a scene of the winter woods, or the presence of children
playing, or with his arm round the neck of a man or woman. His love, above
all love, has leisure and expanse--he leaves room ahead of himself. He is
no irresolute or suspicious lover--he is sure--he scorns intervals. His
experience and the showers and thrills are not for nothing.