■MM ■■ KNnRUj v5k£az ffiWvfoi rKn •'■ ; '■■■■■' ■ JvMU •':■'■■**.■■-..';,'.•■ mm WiiHTiT . ■ ■••,.:•. 111111 ■V.L-- .'■■:■■.•. -.' ■■"■'" ' SuieE ■"SB ■J u jt *\ V 00 , - z . . - ^ •\ v ^ c» Ijr-rr s ^% '"+A. V s \ NATURE RALPH WALDO EMERSON New York DUFFIELD & COMPANY 1909 i NATURE The rounded world is fair to see, Nine times folded in mystery : Though baffled seers cannot impart The secret of its laboring heart, Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast, And all is clear from east to west. Spirit that lurks each form within Beckons to spirit of its kin; Self-kindled every atom glows, And hints the future which it owes. There are days which occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if na- ture would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shin- ing hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather, which we dis- tinguish by the name of Indian Summer. The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The soli- tary places do not seem quite lone- ly. At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our re- ligions, and reality which discred- its our heroes. Here we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. We have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How willingly we would escape the barriers which render them comparatively impotent, escape the sophistication and second thought, and suffer na- ture to entrance us. The tempered light of the woods is like a perpet- ual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported spells of these places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks, almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures, and by thoughts fast succeeding each other, until by degrees the recol- lection of home was crowded out of the mind, all memory obliter- ated by the tyranny of the present, and we were led in triumph by na- ture. These enchantments are medici- nal, they sober and heal us. These are plain pleasures, kindly and na- tive to us. We come to our own, and make friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools would persuade us to de- spise. We never can part with it; the mind loves its old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our eyes, and hands, and feet. It is firm water: it is cold flame: what health, what affinity! Ever an old friend, ever like a dear friend and brother, when we chat affectedly with strangers, comes in this honest face, and takes a grave liberty with us, and shames us out of our nonsense. Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath. There are all degrees of natural influ- ence, from these quarantine pow- ers of nature, up to her dearest and gravest ministrations to the imagi- nation and the soul. There is the bucket of cold water from the spring, the wood-fire to which the chilled traveler rushes for safety — and there is the sublime moral of s^mrvTv] mmm autumn and of noon. We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains, and we receive glances from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude, and foretell the remotest future. The blue zenith is the point in which romance and reality meet. I think, if we should be rapt away into all that we dream of heaven, and should con- verse with Gabriel and Uriel, the upper sky would be all that would remain of our furniture. It seems as if the day was not wholly profane, in which we have given heed to some natural object. The fall of snowflakes in a still air, preserving to each crystal its per- fect form; the blowing of sleet over a wide sheet of water, and over plains ; the waving rye-field ; the mimic waving of acres of hous- tonia, whose innumerable florets whiten and ripple before the eye; the reflections of trees and flowers in glassy lakes; the musical steam- ing odorous south wind, which converts all trees towind-harps ;the crackling and spurting of hemlock in the flames; or of pine-logs, which yield glory to the walls and faces in the sitting-room, — these are the music and pictures of the most ancient religion. My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and on the skirt of the vil- lage. But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle, I leave the village politics and per- sonalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter 13 without novitiate and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredi- ble beauty: we dip our hands in this painted element: our eyes are bathed in these lights and forms. A holiday, a villeggiatura, a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and taste, ever decked and enjoyed, establishes it- self on the instant. These sunset clouds, these delicately emerging stars, with their private and inef- fable glances, signify it and prof- fer it. I am taught the poorness of our invention, the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned that they must work as enhancement and sequel to this original beauty. I am overin- structed for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to please. I can- not go back to toys. I am grown 14 d3X^ expensive and sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance; but a countryman shall be my mas- ter of revels. He who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchant- ments, is the rich and royal man. Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the mean- ing of their hanging-gardens, vil- las, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves, to back their faulty personality with these strong ac- cessories. I do not wonder that the landed interest should be invinci- ble in the state with these danger- ous auxiliaries. These bribe and invite; not kings, not palaces, not men, not women, but these tender m IS and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises. We heard what the rich man said, we knew of his villa, his grove, his wine, and his company, but the provocation and point of the invitation came out of these be- guiling stars. In their soft glances, I see what men strove to realize in some Versailles, or Paphos, or Ctesiphon. Indeed, it is the magi- cal lights of the horizon, and the blue sky for the background, which saves all our works of art, which were otherwise bawbles. When the rich tax the poor with servility and obsequiousness, they should consider the effect of man reputed to be the possessors of na- ture, on imaginative minds. Ah! if the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches! A boy hears a mili- tary band play on the field at night, and he has kings and queens, and famous chivalry palpably be- fore him. He hears the echoes of a horn in a hill country, in the Notch Mountains, for example, which converts the mountains into an Aeolian harp, and this super- natural tiralira restores to him the Dorian mythology, Apollo, Di- ana, and all divine hunters and huntresses. Can a musical note be so lofty, so haughtily beautiful! To the poor young poet, thus fabulous is his picture of society-; he is loy- al; he respects the rich; they are rich for the sake of his imagina- tion; how poor his fancy would be, if they were not rich! That they have some high-fenced grove, which they call a park; that they live in larger and better-garnished saloons than he has visited, and go in coaches, keeping only the society of the elegant, to watering-places, n and to distant cities, are the groundwork from which he has delineated estates of romance, compared with which their actual possessions are shanties and pad- docks. The muse herself betrays her son, and enhances the gifts of wealth and well-born beauty, by a radiation out of the air, and clouds, and forests that skirt the road, — a certain haughty favor, as if from patrician genii to patri- cians, a kind of aristocracy in na- ture, a prince of the power of the air. The moral sensibility which makes Edens and Tempes so easily, may not be always found, but the material landscape is never far off. We can find these en- chantments without visiting the Como Lake, or the Madeira Isl- ands. We exaggerate the praises 38 of local scenery. In every land- scape, the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock as well as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down over the brown- est, homeliest common, with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt. The up- rolled clouds and the colors of morning and evening, will trans- figure maples and alders. The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is great difference in the beholders. There is nothing so wonderful in any particular landscape, as the necessity of being beautiful under which every landscape lies. Na- ture cannot be surprised in un- dress. Beauty breaks in every- where. But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of readers on this topic, which school-men called natura naturata, or nature passive. One can hardly speak directly of it without excess. It is as easy to broach in mixed companies what is called "the subject of religion." A susceptible person does not like to divulge his tastes in this kind, without the apology of some triv- ial necessity: he goes to see a wood-lot, or to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral from a remote locality, or he car- ries a fowling-piece, or a fishing- rod. I suppose this shame must have a good reason. A dilettant- ism in nature is barren and un- worthy. The fop of fields is no better than his brother of Broad- way. Men are naturally hunters and inquisitive of woodcraft, and I suppose that such a gazetteer as wood-cutters and Indians should furnish facts for, would take place in the most sumptuous drawing- rooms of all the "Wreaths" and "Flora's chaplets" of the book- shops ; yet ordinarily, whether we are too clumsy for so subtle a topic, or from whatever cause, as soon as men begin to write on na- ture, they fall into euphuism. Fri- volity is a most unfit tribute to Pan, who ought to be represented in the mythology as the most conti- nent of gods. I would not be fri- volous before the admirable re- serve and prudence of time, yet I cannot renounce the right of re- turning often to this old topic. The multitude of false churches ac- credits the true religion. Litera- ture, poetry, science, are the hom- age of man to this unfathomed se- cret, concerning which no sane man can affect an indifference or incuriosity. Nature is loved by what is best in us. It is loved as the city of God, although, or rath- er because there is no citizen. The sunset is unlike anything that is underneath it: it wants men. And the beauty of nature must always seem unreal and mocking, until the landscape has human figures, that are as good as itself. If there were good men, there would never be this rapture in nature. If the king is in the palace nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people, to find relief in the majes- tic men that are suggested by the pictures and the architecture. The critics who complain of the sickly separation of the beauty of nature from the thing to be done, must consider that our hunting of the picturesque is inseparable from our protest against false society. Man is fallen ; nature is erect, and serves as a differential thermome- ter, detecting the presence or ab- sence of the divine sentiment in man. By fault of our dulness and selfishness, we are looking up to nature, but when we are convales- cent, nature will look up to us. We see the foaming brook with com- punction: if our own life flowed with the right energy, we should shame the brook. The stream of zeal sparkles with real fire, and not with reflex rays of sun and moon. Nature may be as selfishly studied as trade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology; psy- % 23 zZ0M$A chology, mesmerism (with intent to show where our spoons are gone) ; and anatomy and physi- ology become phrenology and palmistry. But taking timely warning, and leaving many things unsaid on this topic, let us not longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, natura naturans, the quick cause, before which all forms flee as the driven snows, itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and multitudes, (as the ancient represented nature by Proteus, a shepherd), and in undescribable variety. It publishes itself in crea- tures, reaching from particles and spicula, through transformation on transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving at consum- mate results without a shock or a leap. A little heat, that is, a little '-J^7>£ motion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling white, and deadly cold poles of the earth from the prolific tropical climates. All changes pass without violence, by reason of the two cardinal condi- tions of boundless space and boundless time. Geology has ini- tiated us into the secularity of na- ture, and taught us to disuse our dame-school measures, and ex- change our Mosaic and Ptole- maic schemes for her large style. We know nothing rightly, for want of perspective. Now we learn what patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed, then before the rock is broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest ex- ternal plate into soil, and opened the door for the remote Flora, Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona, to come in. How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped! how inconceivably remote is man! All duly arrive, and then race after race of men. It is a long way from granite to the oyster; further yet to Plato, and the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet all must come, as surely as the first atom has two sides. Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second se- crets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumb-nail, or the signet of a ring. The whirling bubble on the surface of a brook, admits us to the secret of the me- chanics of the sky. Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A lit- tle water made to rotate in a cup explains the formation of the sim- pler shells ; the addition of matter 26 from year to year, arrives at last at the most complex forms ; and yet so poor is nature with all her craft, that, from the beginning to the end of the universe, she has but one stuff, — but one stuff with its two ends, to serve up all her dream- like variety. Compound it how she will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays the same properties. Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms and equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth, and, at the same time, she arms and equips another animal to destroy it. Space exists to divide crea- tures ; but by clothing the sides of a bird with a few feathers, she gives him a petty omnipresence. 27 ■__ The direction is forever onward, but the artist still goes back for materials, and begins again with the first elements on the most ad- vanced stage: otherwise, all goes to ruin. If we look at her work, we seem to catch a glance of a sys- tem in transition. Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward toward conscious- ness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their impris- onment, rooted in the ground. The animal is the novice and proba- tioner of a more advanced order. The men, though young, having tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, are already dissipated: the maples and ferns are still un- corrupt; yet no doubt, when they come to consciousness, they too will curse and swear. Flowers so _— strictly belong to youth, that we adult men soon come to feel, that their beautiful generations con- cern not us : we have had our day; now let the children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors with our ridiculous ten- derness. Things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of the eye, from any one object the parts and properties of any other may be predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city wall would certify us of the neces- sity that man must exist, as readily as the city. That identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great intervals on our customary scale. We talk of deviations from natural life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smooth- est curled courtier in the boudoirs 1 *1\\ i of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and is directly related, there amid essences and billets-doux, to Hima- laya mountain-chains and the axis of the globe. If we consider how much we are nature's, we need not be superstitious about towns, as if that terrific or benefic force did not find us there also, and fashion cities. Nature, who made the ma- son, made the house. We may easily hear too much of rural in- fluences. The cool, disengaged air of natural objects, makes them enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures with red faces, and we think we shall be as grand as they, if we camp out and eat roots; but let us be men instead of wood- chucks, and the oak and the elm shall gladly serve us, though we 30 sit in chairs of ivory on carpets of silk. This guiding identity runs through all the surprises and con- trasts of the piece, and character- izes every law. Man carries the world in his head, the whole as- tronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in natural sci- ence was divined by the presenti- ment of somebody, before it was actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing laws which bind the farthest re- gions of nature : moon, plant, gas, crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its own, and recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment. m* The common sense of Franklin, Dalton, Davy and Black, is the same common sense which made the arrangements which now it discovers. If the identity expresses organ- ized rest, the counter action runs also into organization. The as- tronomers said, "Give us matter, and a little motion, and we will construct the universe. It is not enough that we should have mat- ter, we must also have a single im- pulse, one shove to launch the mass, and generate the harmony of the centrifugal and centripetal forces. Once heave the ball from the hand, and we can show how all this mighty order grew." "A very unreasonable postulate," said the metaphysicians, "and a plain beg- ging of the question. Could you not prevail to know the genesis of 32 ■ ~ projection, as well as the continua- tion of it?" Nature, meanwhile, had not waited for the discussion, but, right or wrong, bestowed the impulse, and the balls rolled. It was no great affair, a mere push, but the astronomers were right in making much of it, for there is no end to the consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal push propagates itself through all the balls of the system, and through every atom of every ball, through all the races of creatures, and through the history and perform- ances of every individual. Exag- geration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the world, without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the planet, it is still neces- sary to add the impulse; so, to every creature nature added a lit- tie violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a slight generosity, a drop too much. With- out electricity the air would rot, and without this violence of direc- tion, which men and women have, without a spice of bigot and fa- natic, no excitement, no efficiency. We aim above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some false- hod of exaggeration in it. And when now and then comes along some sad, sharp-eyed man, who sees how paltry a game is played, and refuses to play, but blabs the secret; — how then? is the bird flown? O no, the wary Nature sends a new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier youths, with a little more excess of direction to hold them fast to their several aims; makes them a little wrongheaded in that direction in which they are Tightest, and on goes the game again with new whirl, for a gen- eration or two more. The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any pow- er to compare and rank his sensa- tions, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a ginger-bread dog, individualiz- ing everything, generalizing noth- ing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpow- ered by the fatigue, which this day of continual petty madness has incurred. But Nature has an- swered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame, by all these attitudes and exertions, an end of the first im- 35 portance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own. This glitter, this opaline luster plays round the top of every toy to his eye, to insure his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We are made alive and kept alive by the same arts. Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of liv- ing, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen. The vegetable life does not content it- self with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigal- ity of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant them- selves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity, that, at least, one may replace the parent. All things betray the same calculated profusion. The excess 36 of fear with which the animal frame is hedged round, shrinking from cold, starting at sight of a snake, or at a sudden noise, pro- tects us, through a multitude of groundless alarms, from some one real danger at last. The lover seeks in marriage his private felicity and perfection, with no prospec- tive end; and nature hides in his happiness her own ends, namely, progeny, or the perpetuity of the race. But the craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature had taken to heart. Great causes are never tried on their merits ; but the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters. Not less remarkable is the overfaith of each man in the importance of what he has to do or say. The poet, the prophet, has a higher value for what he utters than any hearer, and therefore it gets spoken. The strong, self-complacent Luther declares with an emphasis, not to be mistaken, that "God himself cannot do without wise men." Ja- cob Behmen and George Fox be- tray their egotism in the perti- nacity of their controversial tracts, and James Naylor once suffered himself to be worshiped as the Christ. Each prophet comes pres- ently to identify himself with his thought, and to esteem his hat and shoes sacred. However this may 38 — - discredit such persons with the ju- dicious, it helps them with the people, as it gives heat, pungency, and publicity to their words. A similar experience is not infre- quent in private life. Each young and ardent person writes a diary, in which, when the hours of prayer and penitence arrive, he in- scribes his soul. The pages thus written are, to him, burning and fragrant: he reads them on his knees by midnight and by the morning star; he wets them with his tears : they are sacred ; too good for the world, and hardly yet to be shown to the dearest friend. ' This is the man-child that is born to the soul, and her life still circulates in the babe. The umbilical cord has not yet been cut. After some time has elapsed, he begins to wish to admit his friend to this hallowed 39 m il experience, and with hesitation, yet with firmness, exposes the pages to his eye. Will they not burn his eyes? The friend coldly turns them over, and passes from the writing to conversation, with easy transition, which strikes the other party with astonishment and vexation. He cannot suspect the writing itself. Days and nights of fervid life, of communion with angels of darkness and of light, have engraved their shadowy characters on that tear-stained book. He suspects the intelligence or the heart of his friend. Is there then no friend? He cannot yet credit that one may have impres- sive experience, and yet may not know how to put his private fact into literature; and perhaps the discovery that wisdom has other tongues and ministers than we, 40 - __ that though we should hold our peace, the truth would not the less be spoken, might check injuriously the flames of our zeal. A man can only speak, so long as he does not feel his speech to be partial and inadequate. It is partial, but he does not see it to be so, whilst he utters it. As soon as he is released from the instinctive and particu- lar, and sees its partiality, he shuts his mouth in disgust. For, no man can write anything, who does not think that what he writes is for the time the history of the world; or do anything well, who does not esteem his work to be of import- ance. My work may be of none, but I must not think it of none, or I shall not do it with impunity. In like manner, there is through- out nature something mocking, something that leads us on and on, but arrives nowhere, keeps no faith with us. All promise out- runs the performance. We live in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated. Hunger and thirst lead us on to eat and to drink; but bread and wine, mix and cook them how you will, leave us hun- gry and thirsty, after the stomach is full. It is the same with all our arts and performances. Our music, our poetry, our language itself are not satisfactions, but suggestions. The hunger for wealth, which re- duces the planet to a garden, fools the eager pursuer. What is the end sought? Plainly to secure the ends of good sense and beauty, from the intrusion of deformity or vulgarity of any kind. But what an operose method! What a train of means to secure a little conver- sation! This palace of brick and stone, these servants, this kitchen, these stables, horses and equipage, this bank-stock, and file of mort- gages; trade to all the world, country-house and cottage by the water-side, all for a little conver- sation, high, clear, and spiritual! Could it not be had as well by beg- gars on the highway? No, all these things came from successive efforts of these beggars to remove friction from the wheels of life, and give opportunity. Conversation, char- acter, were the avowed ends; wealth was good as it appeased the animal cravings, cured the smoky chimney, silenced the creaking door, brought friends together in a warm and quiet room, and kept 43 the children and the dinner-table in a different apartment. Thought, virtue, beauty, were the ends; but it was known that men of thought and virtue sometimes had the headache, or wet feet, or could lose good time, whilst the room was getting warm in winter days. Un- luckily, in the exertions necessary to remove these inconveniences, the main attention has been divert- ed to this object; the old aims have been lost sight of, and to remove friction has come to be the end. That is the ridicule of rich men, and Boston, London, Vienna, and now the governments generally of the world, are cities and govern- ments of the rich, and the masses are not men, but poor men, that is, men who would be rich; this is the ridicule of the class, that they arrive with pains and sweat and fury nowhere; when all is done, it is for nothing. They are like one who has inter- rupted the conversation of a com- pany to make his speech, and now has forgotten what he went to say. The appearance strikes the eye everywhere of an aimless society, of aimless nations. Were the ends of nature so great and cogent, as to exact this immense sacrifice of men? Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there is, as might be expected, a similar effect on the eye from the face of external nature. There is in woods and waters a certain en- ticement and flattery, together with a failure to yield a present satisfaction. This disappointment, is felt in every landscape. I have seen the softness and beauty of the summer clouds floating feathery 45 overhead, enjoying, as it seemed, their height and privilege of mo- tion, whilst yet they appeared not so much the drapery of this place and hour, as forelooking to some pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond. It is an odd jealousy: but the poet finds himself not near enough to his object. The pine tree, the river, the bank of flowers before him, does not seem to be nature. Nature is still elsewhere. This or this is but outskirt and far- off reflection and echo of the tri- umph that has passed by and is now at its glancing splendor and hey- day, perchance in the neighboring fields, or, if you stand in the field, then in the adjacent woods. The present object shall give you this sense of stillness that follows a pageant which has just gone by. What splendid distance, what re- 46 cesses of ineffable pomp and love- liness in the sunset! But who can go where they are, or lay his hand or plant his foot thereon? Off they fall from the round world forever and ever. It is the same among men and women as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a pres- ence and satisfaction. Is it, that beauty can never be grasped? in persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible? The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charm of his maiden in her accept- ance of him. She was heaven whilst he pursued her as a star: she cannot be heaven, if she stoops to such a one as he. What shall we say of this omni- present appearance of that first projectile impulse, of this flattery and balking of so many well- 47 meaning creatures? Must we not suppose somewhere in the universe a slight treachery and derision? Are we not engaged to a serious resentment of this use that is made of us? Are we tickled trout, and fools of nature? One look at the face of heaven and earth lays all petulance at rest, and soothes us to wiser convictions. To the in- telligent, nature converts itself in- to a vast promise, and will not be rashly explained. Her secret is untold. Many and many an CEdi- pus arrives: he has the whole mystery teeming in his brain. Alas! the same sorcery has spoiled his skill; no syllable can he shape on his lips. Her mighty orbit vaults like the fresh rainbow into the deep, but no archangel's wing was yet strong enough to follow it, and report of the return of the curve. But it also appears, that our actions are seconded and dis- posed to greater conclusions than we designed. We are escorted on every hand through life by spir- itual agents, and a beneficent pur- pose lies in wait for us. We can- not bandy words with nature, or deal with her as we deal with per- sons. If we measure our individ- ual forces against hers, we may easily feel as if we were the sport of an insuperable destiny. But if, instead of identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that the soul of the workman streams through us, we shall find the peace of the morning dwelling first in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity and chemistry, and, over them, of life, pre-exist- ing within us in their highest form. The uneasiness which »the thought of our helplessness in the chain of causes occasions us, re- sults from looking too much at one condition of nature, namely, Mo- tion. But the drag is never taken from the wheel. Wherever the im- pulse exceeds the Rest or Identity insinuates its compensation. All over the wide fields of earth grows the prunella or self-heal. After every foolish day we sleep off the fumes and furies of its hours ; and though we are always engaged with particulars, and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to every experiment the innate universal laws. These, while they exist in the mind as ideas, stand around us in nature forever embodied, a present sanity to expose and cure the insanity of men. Our servi- tude to particulars betrays us into 50 a hundred foolish expectations. We anticipate a new era from the invention of a locomotive, or a balloon; the new engine brings with it the old checks. They say that by electro-magnetism, your salad shall be grown from the seed whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of our mod- ern aims and endeavors, — of our condensation and acceleration of objects : but nothing is gained : na- ture cannot be cheated : man's life is but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow. In these checks and impossibilities, however, we find our advantage, not less than in impulses. Let the victory fall where it will, we are on that side. And the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the center to the poles of nature, and have some stake in la^^aifc every possibility, lends that sub- lime luster to death, which phil- osophy and religion have too out- wardly and literally striven to ex- press in the popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no dis- continuity, no spent ball. The di- vine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile es- sence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of the in- flunce on the mind, of natural ob- jects, whether inorganic or organ- ized. Man imprisoned, man crys- tallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. That power Mk- . -B» _ which does not respect quantity, which makes the whole and the particle its equal channel, dele- gates its smile to the morning, and distills its essence into every drop of rain. Every moment instructs, and every object : for wisdom is in- fused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it con- vulsed us as pain ; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence, until after a long time. OCT 12 1909 ■ o- "O 'V 'A r^ £-> % ** V % ^ .*' <2> 'V