“doubtful tale from fairy-land
  Hard for the non-elect to understand.”

The same experience had been gone through by Wordsworth.

“Whatever is too original,” says De Quincey, “will be hated at the first.  It must slowly mould a public for itself; and the resistance of the early thoughtless judgments must be overcome by a counter-resistance to itself, in a better audience slowly mustering against the first.  Forty and seven years it is since William Wordsworth first appeared as an author.  Twenty of these years he was the scoff of the world, and his poetry a by-word of scorn.  Since then, and more than once, senates have rung with acclamations to the echo of his name.”

No writer is more deeply imbued with the spirit of Wordsworth than Emerson, as we cannot fail to see in turning the pages of “Nature,” his first thoroughly characteristic Essay.  There is the same thought in the Preface to “The Excursion” that we find in the Introduction to “Nature.”

“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?”

                            “Paradise and groves
      Elysian, Fortunate Fields—­like those of old
      Sought in the Atlantic Main, why should they be
      A history only of departed things,
      Or a mere fiction of what never was?”

“Nature” is a reflective prose poem.  It is divided into eight chapters, which might almost as well have been called cantos.

Never before had Mr. Emerson given free utterance to the passion with which the aspects of nature inspired him.  He had recently for the first time been at once master of himself and in free communion with all the planetary influences above, beneath, around him.  The air of the country intoxicated him.  There are sentences in “Nature” which are as exalted as the language of one who is just coming to himself after having been etherized.  Some of these expressions sounded to a considerable part of his early readers like the vagaries of delirium.  Yet underlying these excited outbursts there was a general tone of serenity which reassured the anxious.  The gust passed over, the ripples smoothed themselves, and the stars shone again in quiet reflection.

After a passionate outbreak, in which he sees all, is nothing, loses himself in nature, in Universal Being, becomes “part or particle of God,” he considers briefly, in the chapter entitled Commodity, the ministry of nature to the senses.  A few picturesque glimpses in pleasing and poetical phrases, with a touch of archaism, and reminiscences of Hamlet and Jeremy Taylor, “the Shakspeare of divines,” as he has called him, are what we find in this chapter on Commodity, or natural conveniences.