Nature's Lessons and Shakespeare's Genius — Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson continues Nature where Indian Summer left off: longevity in a perfect day, solitary places not lonely, and at the forest gate the surprised man of the world drops the knapsack of custom. Here is sanctity which shames our religions and reality which discredits our heroes. Nature dwarfs every other circumstance and judges like a god. The tempered light of the woods is perpetual morning; incommunicable trees persuade us to quit our life of solemn trifles until the tyranny of the present crowds home out of the mind.

These enchantments are medicinal. Cities give the senses too little room; we require horizon as we require water. A day heedful of snowflakes, sleet, rye-fields, and wind-harps becomes the music of the most ancient religion. With one stroke of the paddle Emerson leaves village politics behind and enters sunset and moonlight too bright for spotted man without probation. The countryman who knows what sweets are in ground and water is the rich and royal man; the poor young poet needs the rich to be rich only for his imagination. Yet in every landscape the astonishment is sky meeting earth, and beauty breaks in everywhere under necessity of being beautiful.

Emerson warns against frivolous nature-writing: the fop of fields is no better than his brother of Broadway. Man is fallen; nature is erect and serves as a differential thermometer detecting divine sentiment. When we are convalescent, nature will look up to us. Emerson admits he can hardly speak of nature without excess and needs the apology of a wood-lot or fishing-rod; dilettantism in nature is barren. He turns homage to natura naturans, the quick cause before which forms flee like driven snows. Geology teaches secular time; motion and rest are nature's first secrets; one stuff with two ends runs through star, tree, and man. Nature arms the bird and the destroyer, feigns to transcend her laws yet keeps them. Man carries the world in his head; every fact was divined before verified.

The aboriginal push propagates through every atom; nature adds a drop too much, a slight violence of direction without which nothing moves. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly. The poet's diary pages burn fragrant to him and cold to his friend. Wealth piles brick, servants, mortgages for a little high conversation, then forgets the aim and arrives nowhere, like rich men and governments of the poor who would be rich. Woods and waters flatter yet fail to yield present satisfaction; nature is still elsewhere. Face heaven and earth and petulance rests; soul streaming through the work finds peace. The locomotive and electro-magnetism promise to cheat nature and cannot; man's life is but seventy salads long. Yet in that limitation Emerson finds sublime luster for death: no spent ball, only circulation, nature incarnating thought and returning to thought again as ice to water. Motion's drag is compensated by identity; nature is incarnation of a thought.

The file turns to Shakespeare. Great men are distinguished by range, not spider originality. Great genial power consists in not being original at all but receptive, letting the hour pass through the mind. Shakespeare owed debts in all directions: the stage owned old plays, Malone counted lines borrowed and built, tradition supplied a better fable than invention. Chaucer drew from everyone; all originality is relative; the Bible and Common Law are social labor. The age mischooses its candles, registers Elizabeth's trifles and lets Shakespeare pass as a popular player Bacon never named. Biography of corn bills and second-best beds sheds no light on infinite invention; Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare. Coleridge and Goethe are named among those who finally appreciated him; the Shakespeare Society hunts poaching gossip while the plays remain the only adequate criticism. His recorded convictions on life, love, wealth, and fate are what matter if you are to meet the man.

Emerson ranks his wisdom above his drama: he wrote the text of modern life, yet remained entertainer rather than prophet, using comets for municipal fireworks while priests read commandments into nature's symbols. In solitude Emerson weighs Shakespeare's halfness: he saw splendor in tree and earth but used them as colors, not commandments; Homer, Dante, and the prophets read nature as duty while he kept the revels. The world still wants its poet-priest, a reconciler who will not trifle with Shakespeare the player nor grope with Swedenborg the mourner. The chapter closes as Prudence begins: what right has Emerson to write on prudence, whereof he has little, except that we write from aspiration and antagonism as well as experience, and must balance lyric words of love with coarser sound.