Meta-Hollander

[Terrance]

An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by
stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the
precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books,
excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and
carried away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors
and the public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds him like an
insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and
histories and criticism. All the value which attaches to Pythagoras,
Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan,
Kepler, Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, or any other who introduces
questionable facts into his cosmogony, as angels, devils, magic,
astrology,
palmistry, mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate we have of departure
from
routine, and that here is a new witness. That also is the best success
in
conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts the world, like a ball,
in our
hands. How cheap even the liberty then seems; how mean to study, when an
emotion communicates to the intellect the power to sap and upheave
nature:
how great the perspective! nations, times, systems, enter and disappear,
like
threads in tapestry of large figure and many colors; dream delivers us
to
dream, and, while the drunkenness lasts, we will sell our bed, our
philosophy,
our religion, in our opulence.
There is good reason why we should prize this liberation. The fate of
the
poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a
drift
within a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the state of man.
On the
brink of the waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying. The
inaccessibleness of every thought but that we are in, is wonderful. What
if you
come near to it, — you are as remote, when you are nearest, as when you
are
farthest. Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison.
Therefore we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an
ode,
or in an action, or in looks and behavior, has yielded us a new thought.
He
unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene.
This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power to impart it, as it
must
come from greater depth and scope of thought, is a measure of intellect.
Therefore all books of the imagination endure, all which ascend to that
truth,
that the writer sees nature beneath him, and uses it as his exponent.
Every
verse or sentence, possessing this virtue, will take care of its own
immortality.
The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative
men.
But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze.

The Poet, an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson 

I find the most pleasure in reading a book
in a manner least flattering to the author. I read Proclus, and
sometimes Plato, as I might read a dictionary, for a
mechanical help to the fancy and the imagination. I read for
the lustres, as if one should use a fine picture in a chromatic
experiment, for its rich colors. 'Tis not Proclus, but a piece
of nature and fate that I explore. It is a greater joy to see the
author's author, than himself. A higher pleasure of the same
kind I found lately at a concert, where I went to hear
Handel's Messiah. As the master overpowered the littleness
and incapableness of the performers, and made them
conductors of his electricity, so it was easy to observe what
efforts nature was making through so many hoarse, wooden,
and imperfect persons, to produce beautiful voices, fluid and
soul-guided men and women. The genius of nature was
paramount at the oratorio. 

This preference of the genius to the parts is the secret of that
deification of art, which is found in all superior minds. Art, in
the artist, is proportion, or, a habitual respect to the whole
by an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and
charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes.
Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is
no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation, men are
encumbered with personality, and talk too much. In modern
sculpture, picture, and poetry, the beauty is miscellaneous;
the artist works here and there, and at all points, adding and
adding, instead of unfolding the unit of his thought. Beautiful
details we must have, or no artist: but they must be means
and never other. The eye must not lose sight for a moment
of the purpose. Lively boys write to their ear and eye, and
the cool reader finds nothing but sweet jingles in it. When
they grow older, they respect the argument.

Nominalist and Realist 
from Essays: Second Series (1844)
by
Ralph Waldo Emerson