“As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more evident.  We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from God.  We do not understand the notes of birds.  The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and the tiger rend us.”

All this has an Old Testament sound as of a lost Paradise.  In the next chapter he dreams of Paradise regained.

This next and last chapter is entitled Prospects.  He begins with a bold claim for the province of intuition as against induction, undervaluing the “half sight of science” as against the “untaught sallies of the spirit,” the surmises and vaticinations of the mind,—­the “imperfect theories, and sentences which contain glimpses of truth.”  In a word, he would have us leave the laboratory and its crucibles for the sibyl’s cave and its tripod.  We can all—­or most of us, certainly—­recognize something of truth, much of imagination, and more of danger in speculations of this sort.  They belong to visionaries and to poets.  Emerson feels distinctly enough that he is getting into the realm of poetry.  He quotes five beautiful verses from George Herbert’s “Poem on Man.”  Presently he is himself taken off his feet into the air of song, and finishes his Essay with “some traditions of man and nature which a certain poet sang to me.”—­“A man is a god in ruins.”—­“Man is the dwarf of himself.  Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit.  He filled nature with his overflowing currents.  Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man the sun, from woman the moon.”—­But he no longer fills the mere shell he had made for himself; “he is shrunk to a drop.”  Still something of elemental power remains to him.  “It is instinct.”  Such teachings he got from his “poet.”  It is a kind of New England Genesis in place of the Old Testament one.  We read in the Sermon on the Mount:  “Be ye therefore perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.”  The discourse which comes to us from the Trimount oracle commands us, “Build, therefore, your own world.  As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions.”  The seer of Patmos foretells a heavenly Jerusalem, of which he says, “There shall in no wise enter into it anything which defileth.”  The sage of Concord foresees a new heaven on earth.  “A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.  So fast will disagreeable appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons, enemies, vanish; they are temporary and shall be no more seen.”

* * * * *

It may be remembered that Calvin, in his Commentary on the New Testament, stopped when he came to the book of the “Revelation.”  He found it full of difficulties which he did not care to encounter.  Yet, considered only as a poem, the vision of St. John is full of noble imagery and wonderful beauty.  “Nature” is the Book of Revelation of our Saint Radulphus.  It has its obscurities, its extravagances, but as a poem it is noble and inspiring.  It was objected to on the score of its pantheistic character, as Wordsworth’s “Lines composed near Tintern Abbey” had been long before.  But here and there it found devout readers who were captivated by its spiritual elevation and great poetical beauty, among them one who wrote of it in the “Democratic Review” in terms of enthusiastic admiration.