...Emerson's discussion of them, language returns to its pre-seventeenth-century habitation with things. But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten...and God. The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself...

...language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature. But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten...and God. The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself...

...language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature. But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten...and God. The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself...

...do to his ability to write a poem about the world? The man who mines his language from nature, whose "picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate...employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God," has found the key to "good writing and brilliant discourse" through the images he culls from nature....

...reputation for memorable images and analogies, partly because that's what he said good writing consisted of. "Wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things," is just one way he put it. So which are the visible things in "Life only avails?" There is a thing...

...language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature. But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten...and God. The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself...

...same manner that the Idea contains particulars."18 "Wise men pierce this rotten diction and tasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque...employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God. ... A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a material...

...language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature. But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things.10 This advice is easier to accept than to apply, as Emerson's own verbal landscapes demonstrate....

...experience with patriotic emotion. The man who steeps himself in "picturesque language," Emerson wrote, "is a man in alliance with truth and God. The moment our discourse ... is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself in images." 15 Similar convictions...

...corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language" (9). Poets, or "wise men" are able to: "pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again...employs it is a man in alliance with truth and God" (9). Once again, Emerson uses the word "harmony": "A life in harmony with Nature, the love of truth...