hundred lines. In all, there are about one hundred and forty pieces, ranging from four lines upward, few of them exceeding fifty lines.

VII.

NATURE.

"NATURE," the earliest of Emerson's books, was published in 1836. It was a small volume of some two hundred pages, openly printed, and containing less than half as much matter as this little book. While, perhaps, not the greatest of his works, it is to us the most delightful. Mr. Whipple has said that "Emerson seldom indulges in sentiment, and in his nature emotion seems to be less the product of the heart than of the brain." This remark does not hold good in respect to "Nature," which is replete with the deepest sentiment and the liveliest emotion. In it the heart predominates over the brain. The style is glowing rather than austere, rising not unfrequently to a lofty pitch of eloquence. It is inspired throughout by a glad spirit born of recovered health, a happy new-found home, and pleasant domestic and social surroundings. Than Concord no more fitting residence could be found for a man like him. The place itself was, and

still is, of the quietest. A half-hour's walk would place him in complete solitude; but there were within sight of his door the abodes of men and women of culture, enough to furnish congenial society, while a ride of a couple of hours would bring him to the doors of his literary friends in Boston and Cambridge, and to the alcoves of the great libraries there. But the book, created under such happy auspices, fell almost still-born from the press. We are told that it took twelve years to dispose of an edition of five hundred copies. Like Wordsworth, he had to bide his time, and "create the taste by which he was to be enjoyed"; and, like Wordsworth, he has not waited in vain.

We shall speak at some length of this bookthe first fruits of his genius, the "first crushings" of the grapes of his intellectual vineyard— for the reason that in it he more or less developed the germs of most of his speculations and theories. We shall also bring together passages from his later writings bearing upon the same or kindred topics, which explain, confirm, and in some degree modify the views therein propounded. In a brief Introduction, he sets forth the general design and aim of the book.

THE END OF NATURE.

"Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers; it writes biographies, histories, and criti

divsted?

cism. 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 religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Imbosomed for a season in Nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply to action proportioned to Nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation to masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own work and laws and worship.

"Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic of those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, Nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, To what end is Nature?"

We will not here pause to call in question the accuracy of the foregoing proem further than to say that, in our judgment, the generalization is far too broad. If by "generations" we are to understand the mass of mankind living at any one time, or even any considerable portion of them, we do not find in all our reading any generation

who "beheld God and Nature face to face." Here and there indeed, scattered through the ages, there have been men to whom God and Nature seem to have manifested themselves partially in an original manner. Of such men, in our view, were the prophets and bards of the Old Testament, the evangelists and apostles of the New Testament, and, above all-speaking only humanly of him, and without touching the point of his divinity-the "man Jesus." If Mr. Emerson, or any one else, chooses to put Buddha and Zoroaster, Menu and Plato, Milton and Swedenborg, into the category, we will not dispute them. Did not all of them claim, in some way or other, to have talked face to face with God? And yet they all looked at the universe, and the great laws of the universe, more or less, and very largely, through the eyes of others. Did not Jesus look through the eyes of Moses and David and Isaiah? Did not Buddha and Plato draw from wells digged by wise men who had gone before them? Does not Emerson look through partially the eyes of all these men, and those of many another? All ages have been retrospective; and we believe that all ages our own included-are also prospective.

Every age dresses itself more or less in the garments woven by preceding ones. Some of these are indeed faded and worn out; others are fading and decaying; some, we believe-and we suppose Emerson believes-will never be outworn through

all human generations. Thus, in a passage already cited from his "Divinity Address," he inculcates the thought that the Christian cultus, with two at least of its distinguishing features, the Seventhday rest, "the jubilee of the whole world," and the institution of preaching, will stand to the end of time. A revelation is not the less a revelation to us because it comes to us through Moses or Paul, through Plato or Confucius. The thing which we see and feel is none the less our sight and feeling because Swedenborg or Emerson has told us where to look for it; and has told us, moreover, how the view of it affected him. If only I see and feel it, it is mine, as really and truly as though no man had ever before felt or thought it. I myself might never have thought out that sublime law of gravitation which binds the entire physical universe into one whole, that law in virtue of which the stars in their courses are kept from wrong, and by which the most ancient heavens are as strong as they were at the dawn of creation. Yet, when Newton has discovered this universal law, and taught it to me, it is mine as much as it was his. It is no more his, the possession of his generation, than it is the possession of all future generations of men.

The trouble with most earnest men, when they compare the present with the past, is that they overlook the immensity of the past; they put ages at one beam of the scale and years at the