📝 您未登录，登录后完成练习可保存成绩、查看最佳记录。
总字符
0
正确字符
0
错误字符
0
错误率
0.00%
耗时(秒)
0
速度 WPM
0
0 / 78
1For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made
2through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life--I wrote this some years
3ago--that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man
4that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news
5in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel
6wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of
7grasshoppers in the winter,--we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle,
8what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and
9they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a
10rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large
11squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure,--news which I seriously think a ready
12wit might write a twelve-month, or twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy. As for Spain, for instance, if you
13know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right
14proportions,--they may have changed the names a little since I saw the papers,--and serve up a bull-fight when other
15entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in
16Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the newspapers: and as for England, almost the last
17significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649; and if you have learned the history of her crops
18for an average year, you never need attend to that thing again, unless your speculations are of a merely pecuniary
19character. If one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a
20French revolution not excepted. What news! how much more important to know what that is which was never old!
21"Kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the state of Wei) sent a man to Khoung-tseu to know his news. Khoung-tseu caused the
22messenger to be seated near him, and questioned him in these terms: What is your master doing? The messenger answered
23with respect: My master desires to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of them. The
24messenger being gone, the philosopher remarked: What a worthy messenger! What a worthy messenger!" The preacher, instead
25of vexing the ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at the end of the week,--for Sunday is the fit conclusion of
26an ill-spent week, and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one,--with this one other draggle-tail of a sermon,
27should shout with thundering voice, "Pause! Avast! Why so seeming fast, but deadly slow?" Shams and delusions are
28esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow
29themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian
30Nights' Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound
31along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and
32absolute existence,--that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating
33and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their
34daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations. Children, who play
35life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they
36are wiser by experience, that is, by failure. I have read in a Hindoo book, that "there was a king's son, who, being
37expelled in infancy from his native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to maturity in that state,
38imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with which he lived. One of his father's ministers having discovered
39him, revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be a
40prince. So soul," continues the Hindoo philosopher, "from the circumstances in which it is placed, mistakes its own
41character, until the truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be Brahme." I perceive
42that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of
43things. We think that that is which appears to be. If a man should walk through this town and see only the reality,
44where, think you, would the "Mill-dam" go to? If he should give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we
45should not recognize the place in his description. Look at a meeting-house, or a court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a
46dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account of
47them. Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last
48man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and
49here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we
50are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality
51that surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow,
52the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and
53noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it. Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature,
54and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and
55fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the
56children cry,--determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and
57overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger
58and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking
59another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If
60the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work
61and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and
62appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord,
63through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place,
64which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and
65frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a
66Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from
67time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces,
68as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily
69conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle
70in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business. Time is but the stream I
71go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current
72slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot
73count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day
74I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any
75more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it.
76My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with
77it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the
78divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.
🎉 全部完成！共 78 行