If there is one supreme
sensation reserved for man, it is the vision of Venice seen from the
water. This sight greeted Emerson at the age of thirty. The famous city,
as he approached it by boat, "looked for some time like nothing but New
York. It is a great oddity, a city for beavers, but to my thought a most
disagreeable residence. You feel always in prison and solitary. It is as
if you were always at sea. I soon had enough of it."
Emerson's contempt for travel and for the "rococo toy," Italy, is too
well known to need citation. It proceeds from the same deficiency of
sensation. His eyes saw nothing; his ears heard nothing. He believed
that men travelled for distraction and to kill time. The most vulgar
plutocrat could not be blinder to beauty nor bring home less from Athens
than this cultivated saint. Everything in the world which must be felt
with a glow in the breast, in order to be understood, was to him
dead-letter. Art was a name to him; music was a name to him; love was a
name to him. His essay on Love is a nice compilation of compliments and
elegant phrases ending up with some icy morality.
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