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“We cannot forgive another for not being ourselves,” Emerson wrote in 1842, and then added, “We lose time in trying to be like others.” One is reminded of passages in the Emerson-Carlyle correspondence, wherein each tried to persuade the other to be like himself. Carlyle would have Emerson “become concrete and write in prose the straightest way,” would have him come down from his “perilous altitude,” “soliloquizing on the eternal mountain-tops only, in vast solitude, where men and their affairs lie all hushed in a very dim remoteness and only the man and the stars and the earth are visible–come down into your own poor Nineteenth Century, its follies, its maladies, its blind, or half-blind but gigantic toilings, its laughter and its tears, and try to evolve in some measure the hidden God-like that lies in it.” “I wish you would take an American hero, one whom you really love, and give us a History of him–make an artistic bronze statue (in good words) of his Life and him!” Emerson’s reply in effect is, Cremate your heroes and give me their ashes–give me “the culled results, the quintessence of private conviction, a liber veritatis, a few sentences, hints of the final moral you draw from so much penetrating inquest into past and present men.”

In reply to Carlyle’s criticism of the remote and abstract character of his work, Emerson says, “What you say now and heretofore respecting the remoteness of my writing and thinking from real life, though I hear substantially the same criticism made by my countrymen, I do not know what it means. If I can at any time express the law and the ideal right, that should satisfy me without measuring the divergence from it of the last act of Congress.”

VIII

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.