Less than three weeks after delivering his sermon “The Lord’s Supper” in December 1832, Emerson was aboard ship sailing for Europe. When he started his return voyage the following September, having met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle during his stay, he had a draft of his first book, Nature, in hand. He wrote in his journal: “I like my book about Nature, and wish I knew where and how I ought to live. God will show me.”
Three and a half years later the book was nearly done, although Emerson wrote his brother William in August 1836 that “the book of Nature still lies on the table; there is, as always, one crack in it, not easy to be soldered or welded.” Whether the crack Emerson perceived was mended or ignored, the book was published the following month in a small edition of five hundred copies. He wrote Carlyle that his “little book” was “an entering wedge, I hope, to something more worthy and significant. This is only a naming of topics on which I would gladly speak and gladlier hear.”
Nature was Emerson’s earliest attempt to comprehensively represent, without losing site of the self, his growing interpretation of the world. It was an inquiry—“Let us inquire, to what end is Nature?”—filled with passages of romantic, rhapsodic beauty and inspiration. His “little book” incorporated several primary principles of his worldview that would continue to support his vision throughout his life: There is a divinity within (“The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God.”); all is interconnected (“The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together, by a subtile spiritual connection.”); and that we must have the faith and trust not to build “the sepulchres of the fathers” but to build instead our “own world.”
—J.C.