Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essays: Second Series [1844]
Nature 
The rounded world is fair to see,
Nine times folded in mystery:
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its laboring heart,
Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.
Spirit that lurks each form within
Beckons to spirit of its kin;
Self-kindled every atom glows,
And hints the future which it owes.
There are days which occur in this climate,
at almost any season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection,
when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if
nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of
the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes,
and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that
has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground
seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These may be looked
for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather, which we
distinguish by the name of the Indian Summer. The day, immeasurably long,
sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through
all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The solitary places do not
seem quite lonely. At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the
world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and
foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step
he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions,
and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find nature to be the
circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god
all men that come to her. We have crept out of our close and crowded houses
into the night and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap
us in their bosom. How willingly we would escape the barriers which render
them comparatively impotent, escape the sophistication and second thought,
and suffer nature to intrance us. The tempered light of the woods is like
a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported
spells of these places creep on us. The stems of pines,
hemlocks, and oaks, almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to persuade
us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history,
or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal
year. How easily we might walk onward into the opening landscape, absorbed
by new pictures, and by thoughts fast succeeding each other, until by degrees
the recollection of home was crowded out of the mind, all memory obliterated
by the tyranny of the present, and we were led in triumph by nature.
These enchantments are medicinal, they
sober and heal us. These are plain pleasures, kindly and native to us.
We come to our own, and make friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter
of the schools would persuade us to despise. We never can part with it;
the mind loves its old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the
ground, to our eyes, and hands, and feet. It is firm water: it is cold
flame: what health, what affinity! Ever an old friend, ever like a dear
friend and brother, when we chat affectedly with strangers, comes in this
honest face, and takes a grave liberty with us, and shames us out of our
nonsense. Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily
and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope,
just as we need water for our bath. There are all degrees of natural influence,
from these powers of nature, up to her dearest and gravest ministrations
to the imagination and the soul. There is the bucket of cold water from
the spring, the wood-fire to which the chilled traveller rushes for safety,
-- and there is the sublime moral of autumn and of noon. We nestle in nature,
and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains, and we receive
glances from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude, and foretell
the remotest future. The blue zenith is the point in which romance and
reality meet. I think, if we should be rapt away into all that we dream
of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel and Uriel  , the upper sky would
be all that would remain of our furniture.
It seems as if the day was not wholly profane,
in which we have given heed to some natural object. The fall of
snowflakes in a still air, preserving
to each crystal its perfect form; the blowing of sleet over a wide sheet
of water, and over plains, the waving rye-field, the mimic waving of acres
of houstonia , whose innumerable florets whiten and ripple before the eye;
the reflections of trees and flowers in glassy lakes; the musical steaming
odorous south wind, which converts all trees to windharps; the crackling
and spurting of hemlock in the flames; or of pine logs, which yield glory
to the walls and faces in the sittingroom, -- these are the music and pictures
of the most ancient religion. My house stands in low land, with limited
outlook, and on the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the
shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle, I leave the
village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and
personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight,
too bright almost for spotted man to enter without
We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty; we dip our hands in this painted
element: our eyes are bathed in these lights and forms. A holiday, a ,
a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing festival that valor and
beauty, power and taste, ever decked and enjoyed, establishes itself on
the instant. These sunset clouds, these delicately emerging stars, with
their private and glances, signify it and it. I am taught
the poorness of our invention, the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and
luxury have early learned that they must work as enhancement and sequel
to this original beauty. I am over-instructed for my return. Henceforth
I shall be hard to please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive
and sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance: but a countryman
shall be my master of revels. He who knows the most, he who knows what
sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens,
and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man. Only
as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid,
can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their
hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves,
to back their faulty personality with these strong accessories. I do not
wonder that the landed
interest should be invincible in the state
with these dangerous auxiliaries. These bribe and invite; not kings, not
palaces, not men, not women, but these
tender and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises. We heard what the
rich man said, we knew of his villa, his grove, his wine, and his company,
but the provocation and point of the invitation came out of these beguiling
stars. In their soft glances, I see what men strove to realize in some
Versailles,
or Paphos, or Ctesiphon. Indeed, it is the magical lights of the horizon,
and the blue sky for the background, which save all our works of art, which
were otherwise When the rich tax the poor with servility and
they should consider the effect of men reputed to be the possessors of
nature, on imaginative minds. Ah! if the rich were rich as the poor fancy
riches! A boy hears a military band play on the field at night, and he
has kings and queens, and famous chivalry palpably before him. He hears
the echoes of a horn in a hill country, in the Notch Mountains, for example,
which converts the mountains into an Aeolian harp , and this supernatural
restores to him the Dorian mythology, Apollo, Diana, and
all divine hunters and huntresses. Can a musical note be so lofty, so haughtily
beautiful! To the poor young poet, thus fabulous is his picture of society;
he is loyal; he respects the rich; they are rich for the sake of his imagination;
how poor his fancy would be, if they were not rich! That they have some
high-fenced grove, which they call a park; that they live in larger and
better-garnished saloons than he has visited, and go in coaches, keeping
only the society of the elegant, to watering-places, and to distant cities,
are the groundwork from which he has delineated estates of romance, compared
with which their actual possessions are shanties and paddocks. The muse
herself betrays her son, and enhances the gifts of wealth and well-born
beauty, by a radiation out of the air, and clouds, and forests that skirt
the road, -- a certain haughty favor, as if from patrician to patricians,
a kind of aristocracy in nature, a prince of the power of the air.
The moral sensibility which makes Edens
and Tempes so easily, may not be always found, but the material landscape
is never far off. We can find these enchantments without visiting the Como Lake, or the Madeira Islands. We exaggerate the praises of local scenery.
In every landscape, the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky
and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock as well as from
the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down over the brownest,
homeliest common, with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on
the Campagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt. The uprolled clouds and
the colors of morning and evening, will transfigure maples and alders.
The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is great
difference in the beholders. There is nothing so wonderful in any particular
landscape, as the necessity of being beautiful under which every landscape
lies. Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty breaks in everywhere.
But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy
of readers on this topic, which schoolmen called natura naturata,
or nature passive. One can hardly speak directly of it without excess.
It is as easy to broach in mixed companies what is called "the subject
of religion." A susceptible person does not like to indulge his tastes
in this kind, without the apology of some trivial necessity: he goes to
see a wood-lot, or to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral
from a remote locality, or he carries a fowling piece, or a fishing-rod.
I suppose this shame must have a good reason. A dilettantism in nature
is barren and unworthy. The of fields is no better than his brother
of Broadway. Men are naturally hunters and inquisitive of wood-craft, and
I suppose that such a as wood-cutters and Indians should furnish
facts for, would take place in the most sumptuous drawingrooms of all the
"Wreaths" and "Flora's chaplets" of the bookshops; yet ordinarily, whether
we are too clumsy for so subtle a topic, or from whatever cause, as soon
as men begin to write on nature, they fall into Frivolity is
a most unfit tribute to Pan, who ought to be represented in the mythology
as the most of gods. I would not be frivolous before the admirable
reserve and prudence of time, yet I cannot renounce the right of returning
often to this old topic. The multitude of false churches accredits the
true religion. Literature, poetry, science, are the homage of man to this
unfathomed secret, concerning which no sane man can affect an indifference
or incuriosity. Nature is loved by what is best in us. It is loved as the
city of God,
although, or rather because there is no
citizen. The sunset is unlike anything that is underneath it: it wants
men. And the beauty of nature must always seem unreal and mocking, until
the landscape has human figures, that are as good as itself. If there were
good men, there would never be this rapture in nature. If the king is in
the palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house
is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people, to find
relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and the architecture.
The critics who complain of the sickly separation of the beauty of nature
from the thing to be done, must consider that our hunting of the picturesque
is inseparable from our protest against false society. Man is fallen; nature
is erect, and serves as a differential thermometer, detecting the presence
or absence of the divine sentiment in man. By fault of our dulness and
selfishness, we are looking up to nature, but when we are
nature will look up to us. We see the foaming brook with : if
our own life flowed with the right energy, we should shame the brook. The
stream of zeal sparkles with real fire, and not with reflex rays of sun
and moon. Nature may be as selfishly studied as trade. Astronomy to the
selfish becomes astrology; psychology, mesmerism (with intent to show where
our spoons are gone); and anatomy and physiology, become phrenology and
palmistry.
But taking timely warning, and leaving
many things unsaid on this topic, let us not longer omit our homage to
the
Efficient Nature, natura naturans,
the quick cause, before which all forms flee as the driven snows, itself
secret, its works driven before it in flocks and multitudes, (as the ancient
represented nature by Proteus, a shepherd,) and in undescribable variety.
It publishes itself in creatures, reaching from particles and spicula,
through transformation on transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving
at consummate results without a shock or a leap. A little heat, that is,
a little motion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling white, and
deadly cold poles of the earth from the prolific tropical climates. All
changes pass without violence, by reason of the two cardinal conditions
of boundless space and boundless time. Geology has initiated us into the
secularity of nature, and taught us to disuse our dame-school measures,
and exchange our Mosaic and Ptolemaic schemes for her large style. We knew
nothing rightly, for want of perspective. Now we learn what patient periods
must round themselves before the rock is formed, then before the rock is
broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest external
plate into soil, and opened the door for the remote Flora, Fauna, Ceres,
and Pomona, to come in. How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped!
how inconceivably remote is man! All duly arrive, and then race after race
of men. It is a long way from granite to the oyster; farther yet to Plato,
and the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet all must come, as
surely as the first atom has two sides.
Motion or change, and identity or rest,
are the first and second secrets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole
code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring.
The whirling bubble on the surface of a brook, admits us to the secret
of the mechanics of the sky. Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A
little water made to rotate in a cup explains the formation of the simpler
shells; the addition of matter from year to year, arrives at last at the
most complex forms; and yet so poor is nature with all her craft, that,
from the beginning to the end of the universe, she has but one stuff, --
but one stuff with its two ends, to serve up all her dream-like variety.
Compound it how she will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still
one stuff, and betrays the same properties.
Nature is always consistent, though she
to her own laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to
transcend them. She arms and equips an
animal to find its place and living in the earth, and, at the same time,
she arms and equips another animal to destroy it. Space exists to divide
creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird with a few feathers, she
gives him a petty omnipresence. The direction is forever onward, but the
artist still goes back for materials, and begins again with the first elements
on the most advanced stage: otherwise, all goes to ruin. If we look at
her work, we seem to catch a glance of a system in transition.  Plants are
the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever
upward towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to
bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground. The animal is the novice
and probationer of a more advanced order. The men, though young, having
tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, are already dissipated:
the maples and ferns are still uncorrupt; yet no doubt, when they come
to consciousness, they too will curse and swear. Flowers so strictly belong
to youth, that we adult men soon come to feel, that their beautiful generations
concern not us: we have had our day; now let the children have theirs.
The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness.
Things are so strictly related, that according
to the skill of the eye, from any one object the parts and properties of
any other may be predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from
the city wall would certify us of the necessity that man must exist, as
readily as the city. That identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing
great intervals on our customary scale. We talk of deviations from natural
life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest curled
courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal
as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and is directly related, there
amid essences and , to Himmaleh mountain-chains, and the axis
of the globe. If we consider how much we are nature's, we need not be superstitious
about towns, as if that terrific or benefic force did not find us there
also, and fashion cities. Nature who made the mason, made the house. We
may easily hear too much of rural influences. The cool disengaged air of
natural objects, makes them enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures
with red faces, and we think we shall be as grand as they, if we camp out
and eat roots; but let us be men instead of woodchucks, and the oak and
the elm shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpets
of silk.
This guiding identity runs through all
the surprises and contrasts of the piece, and characterizes every law.
Man carries the world in his head, the whole
astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because the history of
nature is charactered in his brain, therefore is he the prophet and discoverer
of her secrets. Every known fact in natural science was divined by the
presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified. A man does not
tie his shoe without recognising laws which bind the farthest regions of
nature: moon, plant, gas, crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers. Common
sense knows its own, and recognises the fact at first sight in chemical
experiment. The common sense of Franklin, Dalton, Davy, and Black, is the
same common sense which made the arrangements which now it discovers.
If the identity expresses organized rest,
the counter action runs also into organization. The astronomers said, `Give
us matter, and a little motion, and we will construct the universe. It
is not enough that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse,
one shove to launch the mass, and generate the harmony of the centrifugal
and centripetal forces. Once heave the ball from the hand, and we can show
how all this mighty order grew.' -- `A very unreasonable postulate,' said
the metaphysicians, `and a plain begging of the question. Could you not prevail
to know the genesis of projection, as well as the continuation of it?'
Nature, meanwhile, had not waited for the discussion, but, right or wrong,
bestowed the impulse, and the balls rolled. It was no great affair, a mere
push, but the astronomers were right in making much of it, for there is
no end to the consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal push propagates
itself through all the balls of the system, and through every atom of every
ball, through all the races of creatures, and through the history and performances
of every individual. Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends
no creature, no man into the world, without adding a small excess of his
proper quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse;
so, to every creature nature added a little violence of direction in its
proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a slight
generosity, a drop too much. Without electricity the air would rot, and
without this violence of direction, which men and women have, without a
spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We aim above
the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration
in it. And when now and then comes along some sad, sharp-eyed man, who
sees how paltry a game is played, and refuses to play, but blabs the secret;
-- how then? is the bird flown? O no, the wary Nature sends a new troop
of fairer forms, of
lordlier youths, with a little more excess
of direction to hold them fast to their several aim; makes them a little
wrongheaded in that direction in which
they are rightest, and on goes the game again with new whirl, for a generation or
two more. The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded
by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations,
abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a gingerbread-dog,
individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every
new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this day
of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose
with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has
secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame, by all these attitudes
and exertions, -- an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted
to any care less perfect than her own. This glitter, this lustre
plays round the top of every toy to his eye, to ensure his fidelity, and
he is deceived to his good. We are made alive and kept alive by the same
arts. Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of
living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen. The vegetable
life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a
single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds,
that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds
may come up, that tens may live to maturity, that, at least, one may replace
the parent. All things betray the same calculated profusion. The excess
of fear with which the animal frame is hedged round, shrinking from cold,
starting at sight of a snake, or at a sudden noise, protects us, through
a multitude of groundless alarms, from some one real danger at last. The
lover seeks in marriage his private felicity and perfection, with no prospective
end; and nature hides in his happiness her own end, namely, progeny, or
the perpetuity of the race.
But the craft with which the world is made,
runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane; each
has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood
to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature
had taken to heart. Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the
cause is reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partizans, and
the contention is ever hottest on minor matters. Not less remarkable is
the overfaith of each man in the importance of what he has to do or say.
The poet, the prophet, has a higher value for what he utters than any hearer,
and therefore it gets spoken. The strong, self-complacent Luther declares
with an emphasis, not to be mistaken, that "God himself cannot do without
wise men." Jacob Behmen and George Fox betray their egotism in the pertinacity
of their controversial tracts, and James Naylor once suffered himself to
be worshipped as the Christ. Each prophet comes presently to identify himself
with his thought, and to esteem his hat and shoes sacred. However this
may discredit such persons with the judicious, it helps them with the people,
as it gives heat, pungency, and publicity to their words. A similar experience
is not infrequent in private life. Each young and ardent person writes
a diary, in which, when the hours of prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes
his soul. The pages thus written are, to him, burning and fragrant: he
reads them on his knees by midnight and by the morning star; he wets them
with his tears: they are sacred; too good for the world, and hardly yet
to be shown to the dearest friend. This is the man-child that is born to
the soul, and her life still circulates in the babe. The umbilical cord
has not yet been cut. After some time has elapsed, he begins to wish to
admit his friend to this hallowed experience, and with hesitation, yet
with firmness, exposes the pages to his eye. Will they not burn his eyes?
The friend coldly turns them over, and
passes from the writing to conversation,
with easy transition, which strikes the other party with astonishment and
vexation. He cannot suspect the writing itself. Days and nights of fervid
life, of communion with angels of darkness and of light, have engraved
their shadowy characters on that tear-stained book. He suspects the intelligence
or the heart of his friend. Is there then no friend? He cannot yet credit
that one may have impressive experience, and yet may not know how to put
his private fact into literature; and perhaps the discovery that wisdom
has other tongues and ministers than we, that though we should hold our
peace, the truth would not the less be spoken, might check injuriously
the flames of our zeal. A man can only speak, so long as he does not feel
his speech to be partial and inadequate. It is partial, but he does not
see it to be so, whilst he utters it. As soon as he is released from the
instinctive and particular, and sees its partiality, he shuts his mouth
in disgust. For, no man can write anything, who does not think that what
he writes is for the time the history of the world; or do anything well,
who does not esteem his work to be of importance. My work may be of none,
but I must not think it of none, or I shall not do it with
In like manner, there is throughout nature
something mocking, something that leads us on and on, but arrives
nowhere, keeps no faith with us. All promise
outruns the performance. We live in a system of approximations. Every end
is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and
final success nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated. Hunger
and thirst lead us on to eat and to drink; but bread and wine, mix and
cook them how you will, leave us hungry and thirsty, after the stomach
is full. It is the same with all our arts and performances. Our music,
our poetry, our language itself are not satisfactions, but suggestions.
The hunger for wealth, which reduces the planet to a garden, fools the
eager pursuer. What is the end sought? Plainly to secure the ends of good
sense and beauty, from the intrusion of deformity or vulgarity of any kind.
But what an operose method! What a train of means to secure a little conversation!
This palace of brick and stone, these servants, this kitchen, these stables,
horses and equipage, this bank-stock, and file of mortgages; trade to all
the world, country-house and cottage by the waterside, all for a little
conversation, high, clear, and spiritual! Could it not be had as well by
beggars on the highway? No, all these things came from successive efforts
of these beggars to remove friction from the wheels of life, and give opportunity.
Conversation, character, were the avowed ends; wealth was good as it appeased
the animal cravings, cured the smoky chimney, silenced the creaking door,
brought friends together in a warm and quiet room, and kept the children
and the dinner-table in a different apartment. Thought, virtue, beauty,
were the ends; but it was known that men of thought and virtue sometimes
had the headache, or wet feet, or could lose good time whilst the room
was getting warm in winter days. Unluckily, in the exertions necessary
to remove these inconveniences, the main attention has been diverted to
this object; the old aims have been lost sight of, and to remove friction
has come to be the end. That is the ridicule of rich men, and Boston, London,
Vienna, and now the governments generally of the world, are cities and
governments of the rich, and the masses are not men, but poor men, that
is, men who would be rich; this is the ridicule of the class, that they
arrive with pains and sweat and fury nowhere; when all is done, it is for
nothing. They are like one who has interrupted the conversation of a company
to make his speech, and now has forgotten what he went to say. The appearance
strikes the eye everywhere of an aimless society, of aimless nations. Were
the ends of nature so great and cogent, as to exact this immense sacrifice
of men?
Quite analogous to the deceits in life,
there is, as might be expected, a similar effect on the eye from the face
of external nature. There is in woods and
waters a certain enticement and flattery, together with a failure to yield
a present satisfaction. This disappointment
is felt in every landscape. I have seen the softness and beauty of the
summer-clouds floating feathery overhead,
enjoying, as it seemed, their height and privilege of motion, whilst yet
they appeared not so much the drapery of this place and hour, as forelooking
to some pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond. It is an odd jealousy:
but the poet finds himself not near enough to his object. The pine-tree,
the river, the bank of flowers before him, does not seem to be nature.
Nature is still elsewhere. This or this is but outskirt and far-off reflection
and echo of the triumph that has passed by, and is now at its glancing
splendor and heyday, perchance in the neighboring fields, or, if you stand
in the field, then in the adjacent woods. The present object shall give
you this sense of stillness that follows a pageant which has just gone
by. What splendid distance, what recesses of ineffable pomp and loveliness
in the sunset! But who can go where they are, or lay his hand or plant
his foot thereon? Off they fall from the round world forever and ever.
It is the same among the men and women, as among the silent trees; always
a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is
it, that beauty can never be grasped? in persons and in landscape is equally
inaccessible? The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charm
of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heaven whilst he pursued
her as a star: she cannot be heaven, if she stoops to such a one as he.
What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance
of that first projectile impulse, of this flattery and baulking of so many
well-meaning creatures? Must we not suppose somewhere in the universe a
slight treachery and derision? Are we not engaged to a serious resentment
of this use that is made of us? Are we tickled trout, and fools of nature?
One look at the face of heaven and earth lays all petulance at rest, and
soothes us to wiser convictions. To the intelligent, nature converts itself
into a vast promise, and will not be rashly explained. Her secret is untold.
Many and many an Oedipus arrives: he has the whole mystery teeming in his
brain. Alas! the same sorcery has spoiled his skill; no syllable can he
shape on his lips. Her mighty orbit vaults like the fresh rainbow into
the deep, but no archangel's wing was yet strong enough to follow it, and
report of the return of the curve. But it also appears, that our actions
are seconded and disposed to greater conclusions than we designed. We are
escorted on every hand through life by spiritual agents, and a beneficent
purpose lies in wait for us. We cannot bandy words with nature, or deal
with her as we deal with persons. If we measure our individual forces against
hers, we may easily feel as if we were the sport of an insuperable destiny.
But if, instead of identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that the
soul of the workman streams through us, we shall find the peace of the
morning dwelling first in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity
and chemistry, and, over them, of life, preexisting within us in their
highest form.
The uneasiness which the thought of our
helplessness in the chain of causes occasions us, results from looking
too much at one condition of nature, namely, Motion. But the drag is never
taken from the wheel. Wherever the impulse exceeds, the Rest or Identity
insinuates its compensation. All over the wide fields of earth grows the
prunella or self-heal . After every foolish day we sleep off the fumes and
furies of its hours; and though we are always engaged with particulars,
and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to every experiment the innate
universal laws. These, while they exist in the mind as ideas, stand around
us in nature forever embodied, a present sanity to expose and cure the
insanity of men. Our servitude to particulars betrays into a hundred foolish
expectations. We anticipate a new era from the invention of a locomotive,
or a balloon; the new engine brings with it the old checks. They say that
by electro-magnetism, your sallad shall be grown from the seed, whilst
your fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of our modern aims and
endeavors,---of our condensation and acceleration of objects: but nothing
is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man's life is but seventy sallads
long, grow they swift or grow they slow. In these checks and impossibilities,
however, we find our advantage, not less than in the impulses. Let the
victory fall where it will, we are on that side. And the knowledge that
we traverse the whole scale of being, from the centre to the poles of nature,
and have some stake in every possibility, lends that sublime lustre to
death, which philosophy and religion have too outwardly and literally striven
to express in the popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The
reality is more excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity,
no spent ball. The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is
the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes
water and gas. The world is mind
precipitated, and the essence
is forever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the virtue
and pungency of the influence on the mind, of natural objects, whether
inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man crystallized, man vegetative,
speaks to man impersonated. That power which does not respect quantity,
which makes the whole and the particle its equal channel, delegates its
smile to the morning, and distils its essence into every drop of rain.
Every moment instructs, and every object: for wisdom is infused into every
form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it
slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or
in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence, until after a
long time.
Selected Criticism on "Nature":
- Francis, Richard Lee. "The Evolution of Emerson's Second 'Nature.' American Transcendental Quarterly, no 21 (Winter 1974): 33-35.
- Harris, Kenneth Marc. "Emerson's Second Nature," in Emerson: Prospect and Retrospect, 1982, pp. 33-48.
See also Emerson's Nature (1836) and "The Method of Nature" (1841).
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