XV.

NATURE.

HERMAN GRIMM, writing on Emerson's death ("National Zeitung"), says, "A picture at Assisi, by Giotto, shows St. Francis restoring to life a woman who had died without confession, long enough to confess to him. The woman raises herself on her bier, and the saint kneels before her. So, it appears to me, Emerson awakened Nature, and gave her a voice, that she might confess to him her secrets, and that he knows of these more than he has told."

With this we may remember one of Emerson's early poems, Musketaquid.

"Because I was content with these poor fields,

Low, open meads, slender and sluggish streams,

And found a home in haunts which others scorned,

The partial wood-gods overpaid my love,

And granted me the freedom of their state."

The Indian, and the farmer who has succeeded him, are caught into the procession of natural forms passing through without interrupting his solitude.

"Beneath low hills, in the broad interval
Through which at will our Indian rivulet
Winds, mindful still of sannup and of squaw,
Whose pipe and arrow oft the plough unburies,
Here in pine houses built of new fallen trees,
Supplanters of the tribe, the farmers dwell.
Traveller, to thee, perchance, a tedious road,
Or, it may be, a picture; to these men
The landscape is an armory of powers,
Which, one by one, they know to draw and use.

They fight the elements with elements

(That one would say, meadow and forest walked,
Transmuted in these men to rule their like),
And by the order in the field disclose

The order regnant in the yeoman's brain.

What these strong masters wrote at large in miles,

I followed in small copy in my acre;

For there's no rood has not a star above it;

The cordial quality of pear or plum

Ascends as gladly in a single tree

As in broad orchards resonant with bees;
And every atom poises for itself,

And for the whole. The gentle deities

Showed me the lore of colours and of sounds,
The innumerable tenements of beauty,
The miracle of generative force,
Far-reaching concords of astronomy

Felt in the plants, and in the punctual birds;
Better, the linked purpose of the whole,
And, chiefest prize, found I true liberty

In the glad home plain-dealing nature gave.”

In this poem there is the feeling of Wordsworth, but the presence of a new creative force is revealed in the succession of the scenes. The intellect with its prizeliberty, with its rood beneath and star overhead-looks not on shifting landscapes but through vistas unfolding from the morning cloud to man, from man to the poetic idea which gathers up again the past and enfolds the whole.

In 1834 Emerson gave in Boston a lecture on "The Relations of Man to the Globe." It has never been published, but in it occur illustrations prophetic of Darwin's theory. He said, "The brother of the hand existed ages ago in the flipper of the seal."

While young Darwin was voyaging around the world in the "Beagle," Emerson was voyaging around a larger sphere without quitting the limits of Concord. It would be interesting to know the dates of some poems of his, especially those of which Tyndall has said that "in his

case Poetry, with the joy of a bacchanal, takes her graver brother Science by the hand, and cheers him with immortal laughter;" and still more of those in which that grave brother is transfigured, as in the mystic-scientific chant of Nature in “Wood-Notes:"

"To the open ear it sings

The early genesis of things,

Of tendency through endless ages,
Of star-dust and star-pilgrimages,
Of rounded worlds, of space and time,
Of the old flood's subsiding slime,

Of chemic matter, force, and form,
Of poles and powers, cold, wet, warm:
The rushing metamorphosis,

Dissolving all that fixture is,

Melts things that be to things that seem,
And solid nature to a dream."

Fortunately, however, we are not without dates which show how early Emerson's poetic dreams cohered in an ideal conception of the new Genesis which Science has since verified. "The day of days, the great day of the feast of life, is that in which the inward eye opens to the Unity in things." Whatever may be the day, by calendar, which shone with such splendour on Emerson, we know that its radiance so encircled him forty-six years ago as to move profoundly wise and venerable scholars around him. The Hon. Horace Mann, eminent for his educational work in America, wrote to a friend concerning a lecture, probably one of twelve, delivered in 1836 at Boston, on the Philosophy of History, in these terms:

"Mr. Emerson, I am sure, must be perpetually discovering richer worlds than those of Columbus or Herschel. He explores, too, not in the scanty and barren region of our physical firmament, but in a spiritual firmament of illimitable extent and compacted of treasures. I heard his lecture last evening. It was to human life what Newton's Principia' was to mathematics. He showed me what I have long thought of so much-how

much more can be accomplished by taking a true view than by great intellectual energy. Had Mr. Emerson been set down in a wrong place, it may be doubted whether he would ever have found his way to the right point of view; but that he now certainly has done. As a man stationed in the sun would see all the planets moving around it in one direction and in perfect harmony, while to an eye on the earth their motions are full of crossings and retrogradations, so he, from his central position in the spiritual world, discovers order and harmony where others can discern only confusion and irregularity. His lecture last evening was one of the most splendid manifestations of a truth-seeking and truthdeveloping mind I ever heard. Dr. Walter Channing, who sat beside me, said it made his head ache. Though his language was transparent, yet it was almost impossible to catch the great beauty and proportions of one truth before another was presented."

In 1836, when Darwin returned from his voyage on the "Beagle" and sat down to his mighty task, the pattern of what he was to do was seen in the mount at Concord, and published that year in the little book entitled "Nature." A writer in the "Saturday Review," after speaking of "the great men whom America and England have jointly lost"-Emerson and Darwin-remarks that " some of those who have been forward in taking up and advancing the impulse given by Darwin, not only on the general ground where it started, but as a source of energy in the wider application of scientific thought, have once and again openly declared that they owe not a little to Emerson." This just remark may be illustrated by Tyndall's words in 1873: "The first time I ever knew Waldo Emerson was when, years ago, I picked up at a stall a copy of his Nature.' I read it with such delight, and I have never ceased to read it; and if any one can be said to have given the impulse to my mind, it is Emerson: whatever I have done the world owes to him."

Dr. Tyndall tells me that in the volume so purchased he wrote, "Purchased by inspiration." And he might have said, "Written by inspiration." The work was inspired by the dawn of a great idea in the writer's mind -Evolution. It has a prelude of six lines

"A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose ;
And striving to be man, the worm

Mounts through all the spires of form.”

Each

In this essay occur such phrases as-"Every chemical change, from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life; every change of vegetation, from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine; every animal function, from the sponge up to Hercules," showing the direction in which his eye is turned. And there are these pregnant sentences: Nothing in Nature is exhausted in its first use. When a thing has served an end to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior service." "Herein is especially apprehended the unity of Nature-the unity in variety-which meets us everywhere. All the endless variety of things make an identical impression." creature is only a modification of the other." Any distrust of the permanence of laws would paralyse the faculties of man.' If the reason be stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces become transparent, and are no longer seen: causes and spirits are seen through them." "The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. "In a cabinet of natural history we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect." "Nor has science sufficient humanity so long as the naturalist overlooks that wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world, of which he is lord, not because he is the most