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Week 2: Nature
1836
EMERSON’S LECTURES & ESSAYS
“Exclusive of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism.”
Coleridge, Aids to Reflection
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
1770-1850“Let Nature be your teacher.”
Lyrical Ballads, 1798
sequere naturam
follow nature
Cicero, Laelius, 5.19
One impulse from a vernal woodMay teach you more of man;Of moral evil and of good,Than all the sages can.
Wordsworth, 1798
Emerson on Goethe:
“the master of histories, mythologies, philosophies, sciences, and national literatures”
Emerson on Goethe:
“He must be a very strong or a very weak man who can read his books with impunity, without feeling their influence in all his own speculation. . . . there is something gigantic about the man, measure him how you will.”
ELLEN TUCKER EMERSON
THE LIFE OF LIDIAN JACKSON
EMERSON
1980
“A man needs a wife to be silly unto.”
R. W. Emerson, as quoted by Ellen Emerson
“Yet a great sorrow is often a greater blessing than a great happiness.”
Lidian Emerson
Emerson’s 1836
April Emerson publishes Carlyle’s SartorResartus
May Charles, Emerson’s youngest brother, diesJuly Emerson meets Margaret FullerSept Emerson publishes Nature
The Transcendental Club is formedOct The Emersons’ first child, Waldo, is born
Nature is
“the living visible Garment of God.”
Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
The Earth-Spirit speaks:
’Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply,
And weave for God the garment thou seest Him by.
Goethe, Faust, I, 501-09
The Emerson Siblings
Phebe 1798-1800John Clarke 1799-1807William 1801-Ralph Waldo 1803-Edward 1805-1834Robert Bulkeley 1807-Charles 1808-1836Mary Caroline 1811-1814
A FEW FULLER FIRSTS
Fuller was the first editor of The Dial.
She was the first literary editor for the New York Tribune.
Her first article for the Tribune reviewed Emerson’s first book of essays.
“Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation.” Essays & Lectures, p. 237
“Man is the wonderworker.” Essays & Lectures, p. 88
“Spirit hath life in itself. And man in all ages and countries embodies it in his language as the FATHER.” Essays & Lectures, p. 21
“A man is a god in ruins.”
Essays & Lectures, p. 45
“A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad.”
“Now is man the follower of the sun, and woman the follower of the moon.”
“The sea is masculine, the type of active strength.”
“The man goes abroad, and works in the world. Thewoman stays at home, and draws him to his place. Theman loves and collects the useful. The womandecorates the house with the pleasant and the beautiful.The man loves solidity; the woman loves form andorder. The man, freedom; the woman, society. Theman, plain speaking; the woman, kindness. Such is thesociety which the divine Spirit institutes.”
Emerson, “Society,” 1837
Woman, “if not the Queen and victor, is thelawgiver. If every one recalled his experiences,he might find the best in the superior speechof women,—which was better than song, andcarried ingenuity, character, wise counsel andaffection, as easily as the wit with which it wasadorned.”
Emerson, “Social Aims,” 1876
“They are not only wise themselves, they make us wise.”
“Social Aims,” 1876
“I have no hostility to nature, but a child’s love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not wish to fling stones at my beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest.”
Essays & Lectures, p. 38
Emerson on Nature as Female
She “pardons.” Essays & Lectures, p. 27
“Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness.”
Essays & Lectures, p. 17
“Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast.”
Essays & Lectures, p. 40ures, p. 40
“To what end is nature?”
“Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.”
Essays & Lectures, p. 11
“Our moods do not believe in each other.”
Journals, 1839
“What then is Nature? — it is the transitory pleasure of the Divine Mind.”
Journals, 1.81 (1822)
“Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf.”
Essays & Lectures, p. 8
t
“We should kill ourselves if we thought men were free, & could derange the Order of Nature.”
Journals, 1849
t
“The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible.”
Essays & Lectures, p. 9
t
Christopher Cranch’scaricature
1839
“Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but also the process and the result.”
Essays & Lectures, p. 12
Κόσμος
The Universe
cosmology
Beauty
cosmetics
“Nothing is quite beautiful alone.”
Essays & Lectures, p. 18
“Nature is the symbol of spirit.”
Essays & Lectures, p. 20
“It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic.”
Essays & Lectures, p. 20
“It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic.”
Emerson, Nature
“All visible things are emblems.”Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
“Examine Language; what, if you except some primitive elements (of natural sound), what is it all but Metaphors?”
Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
“The whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.”
Emerson, Nature
“Every object rightly seen, unlocks a new faculty of the soul.”
Coleridge, Aids to Reflection
“Nature is a discipline of the understanding in intellectual truths.”
Essays and Lectures, p. 26
“Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate,—debt, which consumes so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be foregone.”
Essays and Lectures, p. 26
“All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature.”
Essays and Lectures, p. 28
“The wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is as wide as nature. The foolish have no range in their scale, but suppose every man is as every other man.”
Essays and Lectures, p. 27
“The wise man, in doing one thing, does all; or, in the one thing he does rightly, he sees the likeness of all which is done rightly.”
Essays and Lectures, p. 30
“For the narrow mind, whatever he attempts is still a trade; for the higher, an art; and the highest, in doing one thing, does all.”
Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s TravelsQuoted in Emerson’s Journal, 1836
“Of that ineffable essence which we call Spirit, he that thinks most, will say least.”
Essays and Lectures, p. 40
“Nature is the projection of God. It is the expositor of the Divine Mind. Chateaubriand called it the divine imagination. Say they, that Geometry is the divine mind, and is the land-scape less so? Yet see how far man is at discord with nature.”
Journals, 1836
“The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”
Essays and Lectures, p. 47
“Until evil is no more seen, and man shall enter his kingdom over nature, such as now is beyond his dream of God.”
Essays & Lectures, p. 49
“Man and nature are indissolubly joined.”
Essays & Lectures, p. 33
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