There is a hill near my home that I often climb at night. The noise of the city is a far-off murmur. In the hush of dark I share the cheerfulness of crickets and the confidence of owls. But it is the drama of the moonrise that Ci come to see. For that restores in me a quiet and clarity that the city spends too freely. From this hill I have watched many moons rise. Each one had its won mood. There have been broad, confident harvest moons in autumn; shy, misty moons in spring; lonely, white winter moons rising into the utter silence of an ink-black sky and smoke-smudged orange moons over the dry fields of summer. Each, like fine music, excited my heart and then calmed my soul. But we, who live indoors, have lost contact with the moon. The glare of street lights and dust of pollution veil the night sky. Though men have walked on the moon, it grows less familiar. Few of us can say what time the moon will rise tonight. Still, it tugs at our minds. If we unexpectedly encounter the full moon, he and yellow over the horizon, we are helpless but to stare back at its commanding presence. And the moon has gifts to bestow upon those who watch. Moonlight shows us none of life’s harder edges. Hillsides seem silken and silvery, the oceans still and blue in its light. In moonlight we become less calculating, more drawn to our feeling. 译文
在我家的附近有座小山，我常在晚间爬上山去。此时，城市的喧嚣成了遥远的低语。在这黑夜的静谧中，我尽情地分享蟋蟀的欢乐，感受猫头鹰的自信。不过，我上山是来看月出的。因为这可以让我的内心重新感到被城市消耗殆尽的平静与清新。在这座山上，我欣赏过许多次月亮升起的景象。每一次月的姿容性情都不同。秋天，满月如轮，充满自信；春天，月亮清雾迷蒙羞羞答答；冬天，银白色的月亮挂在漆黑的、悄无声息的夜空中，显得那样孤寂；夏天，橘黄色的月似被烟尘笼罩，俯瞰干燥的田野。每一种月亮，都像美妙的音乐，颤动我的心灵，令我的灵魂平静。但我们 这些深居简出的人，已与月亮失去了联系。城市中耀眼的街灯和污染性烟尘遮住了夜空。虽然人类已在月亮上行走过，但月亮对我们却更加陌生了。现在已很少有人能说出今晚月亮何时升起，但无论怎样，月亮依然打动我们的心灵。如果我们在不经意间与地平线上的满月相遇，我们别无他法，唯有欣赏其气势逼人的美。月亮对于那些赏月的人有礼物相赠。月色下，我们看不到生活中坚硬的棱角。山坡在月光下如同笼上了一层柔和的银纱，大海在月光下宁明碧蓝。我们在月光下也不再像白日那般心计来往，而是沉醉与自然的情感中。
Today I have read The Tempest…Among the many reasons which make me glad to have been born in England, one of the first is that I read Shakespeare in my mother tongue. If I try to imagine myself as one who cannot know him face to face, who hears him only speaking from afar, and that in accents which only through the labouring intelligence can touch the living soul, there comes upon me a sense of chill discouragement, of dreary deprivation. I am wont to think that I can read Homer, and, assuredly, if any man enjoys him, it is I; but can I for a moment dream that Homer yields me all his music, that his word is to me as to him who walked by the Hellenic shore when Hellas lived? I know that there reaches me across the vast of time no more than a faint and broken echo; I know that it would be fainter still, but for its blending with those memories of youth which are as a glimmer of the world’s primeval glory. Let every land have joy of its poet; for the poet is the land itself, all its greatness and its sweetness, all that incommunicable heritage for which men live and die. As I close the book, love and reverence possess me. Whether does my full heart turn to the great Enchanter, or to the island upon which he has laid his spell? I know not. I cannot think of them apart. In the love and reverence awakened by that voice of voices, Shakespeard and England are but one.
译文：
今天我读了《暴风雨》……在使我感到有幸生于英格兰的诸多理由中，最主要的一个是，我能用自己的母语读莎士比亚。假如让我试着想象自己与他面对面都不认识，只能听见他在遥远的地方说着只有通过艰难的智慧才能触动生命灵魂的另一种语言，这让我感到灰心丧气，四肢发凉，感到一种被剥夺的痛苦。我总是相信我能够读懂荷马，如果有谁喜欢他的话，那就是我。但是，我能幻想着，哪怕是一分钟，希望自己可以领会荷马的所有音乐、希望他的每个字词对我和对一个自古希腊存在就漫步希腊海滨的人产生同等的魅力吗？不能。在穿越漫长的时间之后，到达我这儿的不过是一个微弱而断断续续的回音罢了。我知道，这回音若不是凝聚了青春时期的记忆，它还会变得更加微弱，那段时期映射出了世界早期历史的辉煌成就。让每片土地都为有自己的诗人而欢乐吧，因为诗人就是土地，代表了它所有的伟大和可爱，代表了人类为之生、为之死却难以言传的传统。当我合上书本，我的心里充满了热爱和敬重。是我的整个灵魂此刻都转向了这位伟大的施魔法者，还是转向了被他施了魔法的这个岛屿？我不知道，我不能把他们分开。在被那万音之音而唤醒的热爱和敬重中，莎士比亚和英格兰是个同一体。
The Cardinal Virtue of Prose
Prose of its very nature is longer than verse, and the virtues peculiar to it manifest themselves gradually. If the cardinal virtue of poetry is love, the cardinal virtue of prose is justice, and, whereas love makes you act and speak on the spur of the moment, justice needs inquiry, patience, and a control even of the noblest passions… By justice here I do not mean justice only to particular people or ideas, but a habit of justice in all the processes of thought, a style tranquillized and a form moulded by that habit. The master of prose is not cold, but he will not let any word or image inflame him with a heat irrelevant to his purpose. Unhasting, unresting, he pursues it, subduing all the riches of his mind to it, rejecting all beauties that all not germane to it; Making his own beauty out of the very accomplishment of it, out of the whole work and its proportions, so that you must read to the end of before you know that it is beautiful. But he has his reward, for he is trusted and convinces, as those who are at the mercy of their own eloquence do not; and he gives a pleasure all the greater for being hardly noticed. In the best prose, whether narrative or argument, we are so led on as we read, that we do not stop to applaud the writer, nor do we stop to question him.
译文：
散文的首要本质
亚瑟·克拉顿—布罗克
散文就其本身而言比韵文长，散文所特有的本质是通过文章逐渐显露的。如果说，诗歌的首要本质是热情，那么散文的首要本质是公允。热情使你即刻有所抒发，有所行动，而公允需要求索，需要耐心，甚至需要压制最高尚的情感……这里的公允并非仅指对特殊人物或特定思想的公允，而是指思维过程中的一种公允习惯，以及由此形成的一种平和的风格和形式。散文作者并非冷漠，而是不愿令任何字词或任何形象引发与旨趣不相关的热情。行文时，他不急不忙，不松不弛；他压抑自身的情感，弃绝所有不相关的华美；就在作品的最后成型时，在整个作品，以及作品的平衡中，他才创造出自己的美，因此，只有读到最后，你才知道，它是美的。当然他有所报酬，因为他受到信任，令人信服，而那些完全听任自我才情发泄的人却没有；正因为他几乎隐去了自我，反而带来更伟大的愉悦。在最好的散文里，无论叙事还是说理，我们边读边随着它的铺叙，以至既不停下来为他叫好，也不停下来向他发问。
The bird, however hard the frost may be, flies briskly to his customary roosting place, and, with beak tucked into his wing, falls asleep. He has no apprehensions; only the hot blood grows colder and colder, the pulse feebler as he sleeps, and at midnight, or in the early morning, he drops from his perch—dead.
Yesterday he lived and moved, responsive to a thousand external influences, reflecting earth and sky in his small brilliant brain as in a looking-glass; also he had a various language, the inherited knowledge of his race, and the faculty of flight, by means of which he could shoot, meteor-like, across the sky, and pass swiftly from place to place; and with it such perfect control over all his organs, such marvellous certitude in all his motions, as to be able to drop himself plumb down from the tallest tree-top, or out of the void air, on to a slender spray, and scarcely cause its leaves to tremble. Now on this morning, he lies stiff and motionless; if you were to take him up and drop him from your hand, he would fall to the ground like a stone or a lump of clay—so easy and swift is the passage from life to death in wild nature! But he was never miserable.
译文：
无论冬霜多么寒冷，鸟儿总习惯轻快地飞回他的巢穴，鸟喙插入翅膀中，很快进入梦乡。他没有恐惧，只有体内的热血变得越来越凉，脉搏跳得越来越弱，到了深夜，或者第二天一早，他从栖息的树枝上掉下来，死了。
昨天他还是活生生的，又蹦又跳，对外界的千变万化反应灵敏，那敏锐的小脑袋瓜就像一面镜子似地反射出大地和天空；他还会一种不同的语言，还具有了解同类的本能以及飞翔的能力。借助这种能力，他能像一颗流星一样穿越天空，从一个地方迅速地飞到另一个地方；飞翔的同时，他全身所有的器官都保持着如此完美的协调，对自己所有的动作如此充满信心，以至于他能从最高的树顶上，或苍茫的天空中，直冲下来，停在纤细的树枝上，树叶却能纹丝不动。然而就在这个早晨，他僵硬地躺在那儿，一动不动。如果你把他拾起来，再从手中掉下，他就会像一个石块或泥块那样坠掉到地上——在野生自然界，从生到死的路程就是这么简单而迅速！但是鸟儿永远不会悲伤。
From science, modestly pursued, with a due consciousness of the extreme finitude of our intellectual powers, there can arise only nobler and wider notions of the purpose of Creation. Our philosophy will be an affirmative one, not the false and negative dogmas of Auguste Comte, which have usurped the name, and misrepresented the tendencies of a true positive philosophy. True science will not deny the existence of things because they cannot be weighed and measured. It will rather lead us to believe that the wonders and subtleties of possible existence surpass all that our mental powers allow us clearly to perceive. The study of logical and mathematical forms has convinced me that even space itself is not requisite condition of conceivable existence. Everything, we are told by materialists, must be here or there, nearer or further, before of after. I deny this—and point to logical relations as my proof.
So far am I from accepting Kant’s doctrine that space is a necessary form of thought, that I regard it as an accident, and an impediment to pure logical reasoning. Material existences must exist in space, no doubt, but intellectual existences may be neither in space nor out of space; they may have no relation to space at all, just as space itself has no relation to time. For all that I can see, then, there may be intellectual existences to which both time and space are nullities.
译文：
从科学中，如果以正当的热情从事之，并且充分地意识到人类智力的极限，能够获得对宇宙万物的存在目的更伟大、更广博的认识。我们的哲学应该是一种积极肯定的哲学，而不是孔德虚假、否定的教条主义思想，因为它不能代表真正的实证主义哲学，而是对后者的篡改。真正的科学不会因为事物不能被称量而否认其存在。相反，它会让我们相信世间万物的奇观与微妙超出了我们的思维能力所能确切达到的范围。对逻辑和数学形式的研究让我确信，即如空间本身也不足以构成可想象存在的必要条件。唯物主义者告诉我们，任何事物只要存在，不是在这里，就是在那里；不是在近处，就是在远处，不是在前面，就是在后面。我否认这种说法，事物的逻辑关系就是我的证据。
康德认为空间是思维存在的必要形式，我不这么认为。相反，我认为空间只是一种偶然，是纯粹逻辑推理的障碍。物质必须存在于空间中，毫无疑问；但是思维既不存在于空间之中，也不存在于空间之外，它可能与空间毫无关联，正如空间与时间毫无关联一样。就我所知，思维有可能既不存在于时间中，也不存在于空间中。