“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.

But “a nobler want of man is served by Nature, namely, the love of Beauty” which is his next subject.  There are some touches of description here, vivid, high-colored, not so much pictures as hints and impressions for pictures.

Many of the thoughts which run through all his prose and poetry may be found here.  Analogy is seen everywhere in the works of Nature.  “What is common to them all,—­that perfectness and harmony, is beauty.”—­“Nothing is quite beautiful alone:  nothing but is beautiful in the whole.”—­“No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty.”  How easily these same ideas took on the robe of verse may be seen in the Poems, “Each and All,” and “The Rhodora.”  A good deal of his philosophy comes out in these concluding sentences of the chapter:—­

“Beauty in its largest and profoundest sense is one expression for the universe; God is the all-fair.  Truth and goodness and beauty are but different faces of the same All.  But beauty in Nature is not ultimate.  It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good.  It must therefore stand as a part and not as yet the highest expression of the final cause of Nature.”.

In the “Rhodora” the flower is made to answer that