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RALPH WALDO EMERSON

NATURE

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American writer and moralist, was born at Boston on May 25, 1803, of English stock and a family of preachers.  He was educated at Harvard for the Unitarian ministry, and became a settled pastor in Boston before he was twenty-six.  Three years later he resigned his charge owing to theological disagreements.  In 1833 he visited Europe and England as a hero worshipper, his desire being to meet Landor, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle.  He saw them all, and formed a lifelong friendship with Carlyle.  Returning to America, he settled at Concord, where he lived till his death, on April. 27, 1882.  His public work took the form of lectures, of which his books are reproductions.  In 1836 he published his first book, “Nature,” anonymously.  “Nature” was the germ essay from which all Emerson’s later work sprang, a first expression of thoughts that were expanded and developed later.  It was published in 1836, when its writer was thirty-three years of age, and known only as a preacher who had become a lecturer.  Already Emerson had adopted the methods of a seer rather than those of the consecutive thinker.  “Nature” was one of the first-written books of great writers that made a deep impression on the understanding few, but had only a few readers.  It presaged the greatness to be; and indeed its poetical quality carries a charm, which Emerson sometimes failed to reproduce and never afterwards surpassed.

I.—­TO WHAT END IS NATURE?

Our age is retrospective.  It builds the sepulchres of the fathers.  It writes biographies, histories, and criticisms.  The foregoing generations beheld God face to face; we through their eyes.  Why should not we also have an original relation to the universe?  Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?  Let us interrogate the great apparition that shines so peacefully around us.  Let us inquire to what end is Nature.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and Soul.  Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which philosophy distinguishes as not me, that is both Nature and Art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, Nature.  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 chipping, 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.