He built his foundation so large that it needed the full age of man to make evident the plan and proportions of his character.  He postponed always a particular to a final and absolute success, so that his life was a silent appeal to the great and generous.  But some time I shall see you and speak of him.”

Section 3.  In the year 1836 there was published in Boston a little book of less than a hundred very small pages, entitled “Nature.”  It bore no name on its title-page, but was at once attributed to its real author, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The Emersonian adept will pardon me for burdening this beautiful Essay with a commentary which is worse than superfluous for him.  For it has proved for many,—­I will not say a pons asinorum,—­but a very narrow bridge, which it made their heads swim to attempt crossing, and yet they must cross it, or one domain of Emerson’s intellect will not be reached.

It differed in some respects from anything he had hitherto written.  It talked a strange sort of philosophy in the language of poetry.  Beginning simply enough, it took more and more the character of a rhapsody, until, as if lifted off his feet by the deepened and stronger undercurrent of his thought, the writer dropped his personality and repeated the words which “a certain poet sang” to him.

This little book met with a very unemotional reception.  Its style was peculiar,—­almost as unlike that of his Essays as that of Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus” was unlike the style of his “Life of Schiller.”  It was vague, mystic, incomprehensible, to most of those who call themselves common-sense people.  Some of its expressions lent themselves easily to travesty and ridicule.  But the laugh could not be very loud or very long, since it took twelve years, as Mr. Higginson tells us, to sell five hundred copies.  It was a good deal like Keats’s

          “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.”