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| Edited By: Ralph Waldo Emerson |Source: DNA |Updated: Apr 17, 2015, 05:10 AM IST
Time is indeed the theatre and seat of illusion : nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century and dwarfs an age to an hour. Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions : the surest poison is time. This cup which Nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful virtue, surpassing that of any other draught. It opens the senses, adds power, fills us with exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, science : especially, it creates a craving for larger draughts of itself. But they who take the larger draughts are drunk with it, lose their stature, strength, beauty and senses, and end in folly and delirium. We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent was a youthful effervescence which we have now lost. Youth is everywhere in place. Age, like woman, requires fit surroundings. Age is comely in coaches, in churches, in chairs of state and ceremony, in council-chambers, in courts of justice and historical societies. Yet few envy the consideration enjoyed by the oldest inhabitant.
The author (1803–1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement
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