The chapter begins inside Emerson's essay on Nature, in the forest, where a day's quiet is enough to make us feel we have lived long. At the gates the surprised man of the world has to leave behind his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish, and the knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step. Here is a sanctity that shames our religions and a reality that discredits our heroes. These enchantments are medicinal. They heal us and bring us back to the ground and water the mind loves as its old home. Emerson says we can find them without visiting Lake Como or Madeira, since the point of astonishment in any landscape is the meeting of sky and earth, and the stars stoop as low over the brownest common as over the Campagna. He warns, too, that nature-writing is easy to overdo, and that the fop of the fields is no better than his brother on Broadway.
He then turns from the landscape to Efficient Nature, the quick cause, which the ancients pictured as Proteus, a shepherd driving his flocks. It reaches its results without a shock or a leap. Its two secrets are Motion and Rest, and its whole code may be written on a thumbnail. A whirling bubble on a brook lets us into the mechanics of the sky, and every shell on the beach is a key. But the craft that makes the world runs into the mind of man. No man is quite sane. Each has a vein of folly that holds him hard to one point, great causes are never tried on their merits, and the contention is hottest on minor matters. Nature keeps no faith with us. All promise outruns performance, every end looks toward another end, and we are encamped in nature, not domesticated. Bread and wine, mixed and cooked as you will, leave us hungry after the stomach is full. The unease at being helpless in a chain of causes comes from looking at Motion alone, because wherever the impulse is greater, Rest insinuates its compensation, as the self-heal grows on every field.
The second half is a portrait of Shakespeare. Great men, Emerson says, are distinguished by range and extent, not by originality. The greatest genius is the most indebted man, and a great man does not wake one morning and decide to find a new continent. He finds himself in the river of the thoughts and events of his day. Shakespeare's youth fell in an age when the English crowd was importunate for plays, in inn-yards and roofless houses, and neither the court nor the Puritans could stop them. He treated the old plays as waste stock for experiment. Malone counts, in the three parts of Henry VI, 1771 of 6043 lines by earlier authors, 2373 written by Shakespeare on their foundation, and 1899 entirely his own. All originality is relative, Emerson adds, and every thinker is retrospective, as Locke and Rousseau think for thousands. The English Bible and the Liturgy were also made by centuries of labour and not by one hand. There was no literature for the million then, and a great poet in illiterate times absorbs all the light that is radiating anywhere, and values his memory as highly as his invention. Chaucer's influence is conspicuous in all the early literature, and Shakespeare took what tradition offered, since tradition supplies a better fable than any invention. Yet the antiquaries who searched for the man found little beyond his shares in the Blackfriars Theatre and an estate in his village. Shakespeare, Emerson says, is the only biographer of Shakespeare, and he speaks to the Shakespeare in us. A good reader can nestle into Plato's brain and think from there, but not into Shakespeare's, and we are still out of doors.
He praises Shakespeare's wisdom, which is inconceivable where other authors' is only conceivable, and his cheerfulness, and says he made one perfect picture, as Daguerre let one flower etch its image on his plate and went on to a million. Then, in solitude, he weighs the account and finds him sharing the halfness of humanity. Shakespeare, like Homer, Dante and Chaucer, saw that a tree has another use than for apples, but he rested in its beauty and used it as a colour for his picture. The priests and prophets of Israel, Germany and Sweden saw through the same objects and read only commandments, until life became a probation and the beauty vanished. Both are half-views of half-men. The world still wants its poet-priest, a reconciler who will neither trifle with Shakespeare the player nor grope in graves with Swedenborg the mourner. The chapter's last page begins a new essay with a question: what right has Emerson to write on Prudence?
