NATURE

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A subtle chain of countless rings

The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.

Introduction
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes
biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God
and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also
enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry
and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to
us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose
floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us, by the powers they
supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry
bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its
faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in
the fields. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We

must trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe that whatever
curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things
can satisfy. Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those
inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In
like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own
design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully
around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?
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 All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories
of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approximation to an
ideia of creation. We are now so far from the road of truth, that religious
teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed
unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the
most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence.
Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only
unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, dreams, beasts, sex.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the

Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which
Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other
men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE. In
enumerating the values of nature and casting up their sum, I shall use the
word in both senses; — in its common and in its philosophical import. In
inquiries so general as our present one, the inaccuracy is not material; no
confusion of thought will occur. Nature, in the common sense, refers to
essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied
to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a
statue, a picture. But his operations taken together are so insignificant, a
little chip-ping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so
grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result.

1. NATURE
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from
society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me.
But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come
from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things.
One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to
give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime.
Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear
one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and
preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which
had been shown! But every night come out these preachers of beauty, and
light the universe with their admonishing smile.
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 The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present,
they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression,
when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean
appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort all her secret, and lose his
curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a
wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected all the wisdom
of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his
childhood.

When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most

poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by
manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of
the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet. The charming landscape which I
saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller
owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of
them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man
has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the
best part of these men's farms, yet to this their land-deeds give them no title.

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see
the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only
the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The
lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted
to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of
manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily
food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite
of real sorrows. Nature says, — he is my creature, and maugre all his
impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone,
but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and
change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from
breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally
well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of
incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight,
under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special
good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. Almost I fear to think
how glad I am. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his
slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is
perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity
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 reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should
tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith.
There I feel that nothing can befal me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity,
(leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare
ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,
— all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I
see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or
particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and
accidental. To be brothers, to be acquaintances, — master or servant, is then
a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal
beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in
streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line
of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion
of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and
unacknowledged. They nod to me and I to them. The waving of the boughs in
the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not
unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion
coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.
Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in
nature, but in man, or m a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these
pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not always tricked in holiday
attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered
as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature
always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the
heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of
the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is
less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.