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Art and Mechanical Reproduction
It is easy to repeat, but hard to
originate. Nature is readily made to
repeat herself in a thousand forms, and in the daguerreotype her own light
is her amanuensis, and the picture too has more than a surface
significance--a depth equal to prospect,--so that the microscope may be
applied to the one as the spy-glass to the other. Thus we may multiply the
forms outward; but to give the within outwardness, that is not easy.
That an impression may be taken, perfect stillness, though for an
instant, is necessary. There is something analogous in the birth of all
rhymes.
Our sympathy is a gift whose value we can never know, nor when we
impart
it. The instant of communion is when, for the least point of time, we cease
to oscillate, and coincide in rest by as fine a point as a star pierces the
firmament.
Henry David Thoreau, Journal, February 2, 1841
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