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NOTES

NATURE

N his boyish poem

66

IN

Good-bye," Mr. Emerson told how, among the cedar and barberry thickets of Roxbury, he found that

Man in the bush with God may meet.

In his boyhood, though city born, the doors of his grandfather's house by Concord River were always open to him. He knew well those meadows, the hills of Waltham and Newton, and the Chelmsford woods in his schoolboy and school-teaching days. The attractions of beautiful and living Nature grew with the increasing repulsion which he felt during his ministry from formalism and Hebraism.

As the little book Nature was Mr. Emerson's first venture in letters, yet is still held as one of his most notable works, it seems justifiable to recall, even at some length, its history and the reception it met with in America and in England.

In his journals it does not appear how long he had been meditating this book. The first mention of it occurs in his diary on shipboard, returning from his earliest visit to Europe in 1833. Just three years later the book appeared. It will be remembered that these had been sad and unsettled days for him. His home had been broken up by the death of his young wife, and his recoil from certain forms and rites in worship had driven him to part from his church. He had made the journey to Italy, France, and England to recruit his strength and prepare for a changed life. He writes, September 6, "I like my book about nature, and wish I knew

I am

my

when and where I ought to live. God will show me. glad to be on my way home, yet not so glad as others, and way to the bottom I could find, perchance, with less regret, for I think it would not hurt me, that is, the ducking or drowning."

In November, 1834, Mr. Emerson came to make his home in Concord and lived for a time with his venerable stepgrandfather, Dr. Ezra Ripley. There, in the little room in the southern gable, since known as the Prophet's Chamber, where later Hawthorne wrote the Mosses from an Old Manse, he worked on his book. Mr. Cabot in his Memoir says that probably the first five chapters had been for some time in hand, that the seventh and eighth chapters seem to have been written after his removal to Concord, and the sixth (Idealism) last of all, as the connection of the two. In writing to his brother William, he says:

CONCORD, JUNE 28, 1836.

My little book is nearly done. Its title is Nature. My design is to follow it with another essay, Spirit, and the two shall make a decent volume.

AUGUST 8.

The book of Nature stilì lies on the table; there is, as always, one crack in it, not easy to be soldered or welded; but if this week I should be left alone, I may finish it.

It was published in September, anonymously; only five hundred copies were printed, and of these many remained long unsold, so that a second edition was not called for until 1849.

In this essay, as in the Sermon on the Lord's Supper, it is interesting to note a more ordered presentation of the ideas such as was usual in sermons than Mr. Emerson in the later writings cared to attempt.

1 A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson. By James Elliot Cabot.

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Mr. Cabot in his Memoir says that by the Christian Examiner, the chief organ of the Unitarians, Nature was treated rather indulgently as a poetical rhapsody containing much beautiful writing and not devoid of sound philosophy, but, on the whole, producing the impression of a disordered dream." He adds, "Transcendentalism was attacked (though more often sneered at) as a threat, however impotent, of radical revolution, but not often, I think, in the person of Emerson. In him, it would be felt, revolution was like the revolutions of Nature, who does not cast off her old leaves until she has got ready the new." The Examiner's view of the work as a poetical rhapsody suggests Dr. Holmes's account of it.

"Nature is a reflective

prose poem. It is divided into eight chapters, which might almost as well have been called cantos. 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.'"' It is, however, very possible that the passage referred to, in the last chapter of Nature, was a poetical rendering of the thoughts of his new-found friend, Mr. Alcott.

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Immediately on the appearance of Nature, Emerson wrote to Carlyle :

"I send you a little book I have just now published; an entering wedge, I hope, to something more worthy and significant. This is only a naming of topics on which I would gladly speak and gladlier hear."

Carlyle thus hailed its appearance :

"Your little azure-coloured Nature gave me true satisfac

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tion. I read it and then lent it about to all my acquaintance that had a sense for such things, from whom a similar verdict always came back. You say it is the first chapter of something greater. I call it rather a Foundation and Ground-plan on which you may build whatsoever of great and true has been given you to build. It is the true Apocalypse, this where the Open Secret' becomes revealed to a man. I rejoice much in the glad serenity of soul with which you look out on this wondrous Dwelling-place of yours and mine, with an ear for the Ewigen Melodien which pipe in the winds round us and utter themselves forth in all sounds and sights and things: not to be written down by gamut machinery, but which all right writing is a kind of attempt to write down. see what the years will bring you."

You will

'people I have

In a letter written in April, 1839, he tells that “ are beginning to quote you here: tant pis pour eux. found you in two Cambridge books; a certain Mr. Richard Monckton Milnes, M. P., a beautiful little Tory dilettante poet and politician, whom I love much, applied to me for Nature, that he might write upon it."

And soon after he received this greeting in a letter from Sterling : I

SEPTEMBER 30, 1839.

I have read very, very little modern English writing that has struck and pleased me so much; among recent productions,

1 John Sterling, a writer of prose and verse (The Onyx Ring; The Sexton's Daughter and Other Poems; Strafford, a Tragedy, etc.), now, however, best known as the subject of biographies by Carlyle and Archdeacon Hare. With this brilliant and inspiring man Emerson formed a close friendship by letters, though they never met, lasting until Sterling's early death in 1847. See A Correspondence between Sterling and Emerson, published by Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1897.

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