Culture

Can rules or tutors educate
      The semigod whom we await?
      He must be musical,
      Tremulous, impressional,
      Alive to gentle influence
      Of landscape and of sky,
      And tender to the spirit-touch
      Of man’s or maiden’s eye:
      But, to his native centre fast,
      Shall into Future fuse the Past,
And the world’s flowing fates in his own mould recast.

Published in The Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson

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