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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.
Essay VI Nature
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
nature 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 shining 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 distinguish by the name of the 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 solitary places do not seem
quite lonely. 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 religions, and
reality which discredits 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 nature to
intrance us. The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual 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 the opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures, and by thoughts fast
succeeding each other, until by degrees the recollection of home was crowded out of the mind,
all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the present, and we were led in triumph by nature.
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These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. These are plain pleasures, kindly
and native to us. We come to our own, and make friends with matter, which the ambitious
chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise. 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 influence, from these
quarantine powers of nature, up to her dearest and gravest ministrations to the imagination and
the soul. There is the bucket of cold water from the spring, the wood-fire to which the chilled
traveller rushes for safety, — and there is the sublime moral of 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 converse 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 perfect form; the blowing
of sleet over a wide sheet of water, and over plains, the waving rye-field, the mimic waving of
acres of houstonia, whose innumerable florets whiten and ripple before the eye; the reflections
of trees and flowers in glassy lakes; the musical steaming odorous south wind, which converts
all trees to windharps; the crackling and spurting of hemlock in the flames; or of pine logs, which
yield glory to the walls and faces in the sittingroom, — 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
village. 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 personalities, 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 without noviciate and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredible 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 itself on the instant. These sunset
clouds, these delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable glances, signify it and
proffer 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 over-instructed for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to please. I cannot go back to toys. I
am grown expensive and sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance: but a countryman
shall be my master 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 enchantments,
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 meaning of their hanging-gardens,
villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves, to back their faulty personality with these
strong accessories. I do not wonder that the landed interest should be invincible in the state with
these dangerous auxiliaries. These bribe and invite; not kings, not palaces, not men, not
women, but these tender 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 beguiling stars. In their soft glances, I see what men
strove to realize in some Versailles, or Paphos, or Ctesiphon. Indeed, it is the magical lights of
the horizon, and the blue sky for the background, which save 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 men reputed to be the possessors of nature, on imaginative minds. Ah! if
the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches! A boy hears a military band play on the field at night,
and he has kings and queens, and famous chivalry palpably before 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 supernatural tiralira restores to him the Dorian mythology, Apollo,
Diana, 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 loyal; he respects
the rich; they are rich for the sake of his imagination; 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, and to distant cities, are the groundwork from which he has
delineated estates of romance, compared with which their actual possessions are shanties and
paddocks. 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 patricians, a kind of aristocracy in nature, a prince of
the power of the air.
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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 enchantments without visiting the
Como Lake, or the Madeira Islands. We exaggerate the praises of local scenery. In every
landscape, 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 brownest, homeliest common, with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the
Campagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt. The uprolled clouds and the colors of morning
and evening, will transfigure 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. Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty breaks in everywhere.
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But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of readers on this topic, which schoolmen 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 indulge his tastes in this kind, without the apology of some trivial
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 carries a fowling piece, or a fishing-rod. I suppose this shame must
have a good reason. A dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. The fop of fields is no
better than his brother of Broadway. Men are naturally hunters and inquisitive of wood-craft, and
I suppose that such a gazetteer as wood-cutters and Indians should furnish facts for, would take
place in the most sumptuous drawingrooms of all the "Wreaths" and "Flora's chaplets" of the
bookshops; yet ordinarily, whether we are too clumsy for so subtle a topic, or from whatever
cause, as soon as men begin to write on nature, they fall into euphuism. Frivolity is a most unfit
tribute to Pan, who ought to be represented in the mythology as the most continent of gods. I
would not be frivolous before the admirable reserve and prudence of time, yet I cannot renounce
the right of returning often to this old topic. The multitude of false churches accredits the true
religion. Literature, poetry, science, are the homage of man to this unfathomed secret,
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 rather 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 majestic 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 thermometer, detecting the presence or absence of the divine sentiment in man.
By fault of our dulness and selfishness, we are looking up to nature, but when we are
convalescent, nature will look up to us. We see the foaming brook with compunction: 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; psychology, mesmerism (with intent to show where
our spoons are gone); and anatomy and physiology, become phrenology and palmistry.
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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 creatures, reaching from particles and spicula, through transformation on transformation
to the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate results without a shock or a leap. A little
heat, that is, a little 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 conditions of boundless space and boundless time. Geology has initiated us
into the secularity of nature, and taught us to disuse our dame-school measures, and exchange
our Mosaic and Ptolemaic schemes for her large style. We knew 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
external 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;
farther 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 secrets of nature: Motion and
Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring. The
whirling bubble on the surface of a brook, admits us to the secret of the mechanics of the sky.
Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A little water made to rotate in a cup explains the
formation of the simpler shells; the addition of matter 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 creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird with a few feathers, she gives him a
petty omnipresence. The direction is forever onward, but the artist still goes back for materials,
and begins again with the first elements on the most advanced stage: otherwise, all goes to
ruin. If we look at her work, we seem to catch a glance of a system in transition. Plants are the
young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards
consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted
in the ground. The animal is the novice and probationer 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 uncorrupt; 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 concern 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 tenderness.
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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 necessity 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 smoothest curled
courtier in the boudoirs 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 billetsdoux, to
Himmaleh 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 mason, made the house. We may easily hear too
much of rural influences. 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 woodchucks, and the oak and the elm shall
gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpets of silk.
This guiding identity runs through all the surprises and contrasts of the piece, and characterizes
every law. Man carries the world in his head, the whole astronomy 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 science was divined by the
presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without
recognising laws which bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, plant, gas, crystal, are
concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its own, and recognises the fact at
first sight in chemical experiment. The common sense of Franklin, Dalton, Davy, and Black, is
the same common sense which made the arrangements which now it discovers.
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If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter action runs also into organization. The
astronomers said, 'Give us matter, and a little motion, and we will construct the universe. It is not
enough that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse, 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 begging of the question. Could you not prevail
to know the genesis of projection, as well as the continuation 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 performances of every individual. Exaggeration 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 necessary to add the impulse; so, to every creature
nature added a little 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. Without electricity the air would rot, and without
this violence of direction, which men and women have, without a spice of bigot and fanatic, no
excitement, no efficiency. We aim above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some
falsehood 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 aim; makes them a
little wrongheaded in that direction in which they are rightest, and on goes the game again with
new whirl, for a generation or two more. The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses,
commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations,
abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a gingerbread-dog,
individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at
night overpowered by the fatigue, which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But
Nature has answered 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 importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect
than her own. This glitter, this opaline lustre plays round the top of every toy to his eye, to ensure
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 living, but because the meat
is savory and the appetite is keen. The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from
the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if
thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, 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 of fear with which the animal frame is hedged round, shrinking from cold,
starting at sight of a snake, or at a sudden noise, protects 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 prospective end; and nature hides in his happiness her own end, namely,
progeny, or the perpetuity of the race.
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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 partizans, 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." Jacob Behmen and George Fox betray their egotism in the pertinacity of
their controversial tracts, and James Naylor once suffered himself to be worshipped as the
Christ. Each prophet comes presently to identify himself with his thought, and to esteem his hat
and shoes sacred. However this may discredit such persons with the judicious, it helps them
with the people, as it gives heat, pungency, and publicity to their words. A similar experience is
not infrequent in private life. Each young and ardent person writes a diary, in which, when the
hours of prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes 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 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 impressive 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, 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 particular, 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 importance. My work may be of none, but I must not think it of none, or
I shall not do it with impunity.
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In like manner, there is throughout nature something mocking, something that leads us on and
on, but arrives nowhere, keeps no faith with us. All promise outruns 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 hungry 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 reduces 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 conversation! This palace of brick and stone, these servants, this kitchen, these stables,
horses and equipage, this bank-stock, and file of mortgages; trade to all the world,
country-house and cottage by the waterside, all for a little conversation, high, clear, and
spiritual! Could it not be had as well by beggars 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, character, 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 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. Unluckily, in the exertions necessary to remove these
inconveniences, the main attention has been diverted 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
governments 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 interrupted the conversation of a
company 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?
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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 enticement 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
overhead, enjoying, as it seemed, their height and privilege of motion, 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 triumph that has
passed by, and is now at its glancing splendor and heyday, 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
recesses of ineffable pomp and loveliness 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 the men and women, as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an
absence, never a presence 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 acceptance 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.
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What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance of that first projectile impulse, of this flattery
and baulking of so many well-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 intelligent,
nature converts itself into a vast promise, and will not be rashly explained. Her secret is untold.
Many and many an Oedipus 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
disposed to greater conclusions than we designed. We are escorted on every hand through life
by spiritual agents, and a beneficent purpose lies in wait for us. We cannot bandy words with
nature, or deal with her as we deal with persons. If we measure our individual 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, preexisting within us in their highest form.
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The uneasiness which the thought of our helplessness in the chain of causes occasions us,
results from looking too much at one condition of nature, namely, Motion. But the drag is never
taken from the wheel. Wherever the impulse 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 servitude to particulars
betrays into 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 sallad shall be grown from the seed, whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner: it is
a symbol of our modern aims and endeavors,—-of our condensation and acceleration of
objects: but nothing is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man's life is but seventy sallads long,
grow they swift or grow they slow. In these checks and impossibilities, however, we find our
advantage, not less than in the 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 centre to the poles of
nature, and have some stake in every possibility, lends that sublime lustre to death, which
philosophy and religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the popular doctrine
of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no
discontinuity, no spent ball. The divine 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 essence is forever escaping again into the state of free
thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind, of natural objects, whether
inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man
impersonated. That power which does not respect quantity, which makes the whole and the
particle its equal channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and distils its essence into every
drop of rain. Every moment instructs, and every object: for wisdom is infused into every form. It
has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed 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.
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