Emerson's love of nature was one of his ruling passions. It took him
to the country to live, it led him to purchase Walden Pond and the
Walden woods; it led him forth upon his almost daily walks, winter and
summer, to the fields and the woods. His was the love of the poet and
the idealist, of the man who communes with Nature, and finds a moral
and an intellectual tonic in her works. The major part of his poetry
is inspired by Nature. He complains of Tennyson's poetry that it has
few or no wood notes. His first book, "Nature," is steeped in
religious and poetic emotion. He said in his Journal in 1841: "All my
thoughts are foresters. I have scarce a day-dream on which the breath
of the pines has not blown, and their shadows waved. Shall I not then
call my little book Forest Essays?" He finally called it "Nature." He
loves the "hermit birds that harbor in the woods. I can do well for
weeks with no other society than the partridge and the jay, my daily
company."
"I have known myself entertained by a single dew-drop, or an icicle,
by a liatris, or a fungus, and seen God revealed in the shadow of a
leaf." He says that going to Nature is more than a medicine, it is
health. "As I walked in the woods I felt what I often feel, that
nothing can befall me in life, no calamity, no disgrace (leaving me
my eyes) to which Nature will not offer a sweet consolation. Standing
on the bare ground with my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted
into the infinite space, I became happy in my universal relations."
This sentiment of his also recalls his lines:
"A woodland walk,
A quest of river-grapes, a mocking thrush,
A wild-rose, or rock-loving columbine,
Salve my worst wounds."
If life were long enough, among my thousand and one works
should be a book of Nature whereof Howitt's _Seasons_ should
not be so much the model as the parody. It should contain
the natural history of the woods around my shifting camp for
every month in the year. It should tie their astronomy,
botany, physiology, meteorology, picturesque, and poetry
together. No bird, no bug, no bud, should be forgotten on
his day and hour. To-day the chickadees, the robins,
bluebirds and song-sparrows sang to me. I dissected the buds
of the birch and the oak; in every one of the last is a
star. The crow sat above as idle as I below. The river
flowed brimful, and I philosophised upon this composite,
collective beauty which refuses to be analysed. Nothing is
beautiful alone. Nothing but is beautiful in the whole.
Learn the history of a craneberry. Mark the day when the
pine cones and acorns fall.
I go out daily and nightly to feed my eyes on the horizon
and the sky, and come to feel the want of this scope as I do
of water for my washing.
What learned I this morning in the woods, the oracular
woods? Wise are they, the ancient nymphs; pleasing, sober,
melancholy truth say those untameable savages, the pines.
He frequently went to Walden Pond of an afternoon and read Goethe or
some other great author.
There was an element of mysticism in Emerson's love of nature as there
is in that of all true nature-lovers. None knew better than he that
nature is not all birds and flowers. His love of nature was that of
the poet and artist, and not that of the scientist or naturalist.
"I tell you I love the peeping of the Hyla in a pond in April, or the
evening cry of the whippoorwill, better than all the bellowing of all
the Bulls of Bashan, or all the turtles of all Palestine."
Any personal details about his life which Emerson gives us are always
welcome. We learn that his different winter courses of lectures in
Boston, usually ten of them, were attended on an average by about five
hundred persons, and netted him about five hundred dollars.
When he published a new volume, he was very liberal with presentation
copies. Of his first volume of poems, published in 1846, he sent
eighty copies to his friends. When "May-Day" was published in 1867, he
sent fifty copies to friends; one of them went to Walt Whitman. I saw
it the day it came. It was in a white dress (silk, I think); very
beautiful. He sent a copy of his first volume of "Nature" to Landor.
One would like to know what Landor said in reply. The copy he sent to
Carlyle I saw in the Scot's library, in Cheyne Row, in 1871.