Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
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 entrance 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 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.
2. 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 traveler 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[473] and Uriel,[474]
the upper sky would be all that would remain of our furniture.
3. 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-fields;
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 wind-harps;[475] 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 village.[476] But I go with my
friend[477] to the shore of our little river,[478] 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 novitiate and probation.[479] 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,[480] 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 overinstructed 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 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,[481] 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,[482] or Paphos,[483] or Ctesiphon.[484]
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
baubles. When the rich tax the poor with servility and obsequiousness,
they should consider the effect of man 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,[485] for example, which converts the mountains into an
Æolian harp,[486] and this supernatural _tiralira_ restores to him the
Dorian[487] mythology, Apollo,[488] Diana,[489] 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 gift of wealthy 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.
4. The moral sensibility which makes Edens[490] and Tempes[491] 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,[492] or the Madeira Islands.[493] 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,[494] with all the
spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna,[495] 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.
5. 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 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[496] 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 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"[497] 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 nature, they fall into euphuism. Frivolity is a most
unfit tribute to Pan,[498] 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[499] 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 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.
6. But taking timely warning, and leaving many things unsaid on this