Beauty

 

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue.  Who can analyze the nameless charm which glances from one and another face and form?  We are touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points.  It is destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to organization.  Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love known and described in society, but, as it seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshow.  We cannot approach beauty.  Its nature is like opaline doves’-neck luster, hovering and evanescent.

 

From Essays  Written by Ralph Emerson (1803-1882)

 

美

 

古人说，“美”是品德之花。瞥视它的容貌样子，谁能说明那种难以言喻的魅力呢？我们因温和满足之情而动容，但我们无法得知这种恍惚闪光般的雅兴究竟指向何方。如果想把美整理出个条理，就会破坏了美的想象。美也不在表现社会所知所说的友谊或爱情的关系，在我看来，美所呈现的是一个迥然不同且无法企及的领域，指出一种超越性的感觉和甜蜜的关系，说明玫瑰和紫罗兰所暗示或预示的是什么。我们无法接近美。美的本质犹如鸽子颈项上的乳白光泽，飘忽即逝。

 

选自《文集》 作者：爱默生（美国散文家及诗人）