The Best Read Naturalist": Nature Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

By Ralph Waldo Emerson and Michael P. Branch

Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in American nature writing, yet until now readers have had no book devoted to this central theme in his work. "The Best Read Naturalist" fills this lacuna, placing several of Emerson’s lesser-known pieces of nature writing in conversation with his canonical essays. Organized chronologically, the thirteen selections—made up of sermons, lectures, addresses, and essays—reveal an engagement with natural history that spanned Emerson’s career. As we watch him grapple with what he called the "book of nature," a more environmentally connected thinker emerges—a "green" Emerson deeply concerned with the physical world and fascinated with the ability of science to reveal a correspondence between the order of nature and that of the mind. "The Best Read Naturalist" illuminates the vital influence that the study of natural history had on the development of Emerson’s mature philosophy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Feb 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9780813939537

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was the leading proponent of the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-nineteenth century. He was ordained as a Unitarian minister at Harvard Divinity School but served for only three years before developing his own spiritual philosophy based on individualism and intuition. His essay Nature is arguably his best-known work and was both groundbreaking and highly controversial when it was first published. Emerson also wrote poetry and lectured widely across the US.

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      The Day is Thine

(1829)

Emerson delivered The Day is Thine on June 14, 1829, to his congregation at Boston’s Second Church. By that time he had been ordained the Second Church’s junior pastor, a position he accepted after nearly two years of itinerant preaching throughout the Northeast. This time of so-called supply preaching allowed Emerson to continue his independent studies and hone his oratorical skills at the pulpit without the obligations of a full-time ministry. Emerson preached as part of the Unitarian movement, a gradually developing resistance to Calvinism that began among established Puritan churches in the mid-eighteenth century. Reacting against Calvinism’s fatalistic conception of God and belief in the inherent depravity of humanity, Unitarianism understood life to be a proving ground for the development of one’s moral character and held human nature to be inherently divine. In The Day is Thine, Emerson looks to nature as a model to elucidate the Unitarian doctrine of self-culture, a belief in personal progression through moral development. For Emerson, the rhythmic cycles of seasons and plant growth exemplify how the system of nature adheres to and expresses a divine order. The perpetuation of these cycles depends on the fidelity of each plant to its role in the larger processes of nature. By drawing attention to the faithfulness of flora, Emerson calls his congregation to follow nature’s example and more closely adhere to their own divine nature. This insight into the analogous correlation of nature to the soul would remain central to Emerson throughout his career. By seeing nature as a moral model and emphasizing its systemic order, The Day is Thine establishes a number of key ideas that Emerson would return to throughout his natural history lectures and essays. As is characteristic of his sermons, there is a general lack of reference to the scriptural reading. Rather, he uses the biblical text as a starting point for a philosophical discussion of personal religious experiences, which he connects to the natural world, which he considered a parallel scripture.

The day is thine, the night also is thine: thou hast prepared the light, and the sun. Thou hast set all the borders of the earth, thou hast made summer.

—Psalms 74:16–17

In this grateful season, the most careless eye is caught by the beauty of the external world. The most devoted of the sons of gain cannot help feeling that there is pleasure in the blowing of the southwest wind; that the green tree with its redundant foliage and its fragrant blossoms shows fairer than it did a few weeks since when its arms were naked and its trunk was sapless. The inhabitants of cities pay a high tax for their social advantages, their increased civilization, in their exclusion from the sight of the unlimited glory of the earth. Imprisoned in streets of brick and stone, in tainted air and hot and dusty corners they only get glimpses of the glorious sun, of the ever changing glory of the clouds, of the firmament, and of the face of the green pastoral earth which the great Father of all is now adorning with matchless beauty as one wide garden. Still something of the mighty process of vegetation forces itself on every human eye. The grass springs up between the pavements at our feet and the poplar and the elm send out as vigorous and as graceful branches to shade and to fan the town as in their native forest.

Those who yield themselves to these pleasant influences behold in the activity of vegetation a new expression from moment to moment of the Divine power and goodness. They know that this excellent order did not come of itself, that this organized creation of every new year indicates the presence of God.

We are confident children, confident in God’s goodness. Though we all of us know that the year’s subsistence to us depends on the fidelity with which rain and sun shall act on the seed, we never doubt the permanence of the Order. We do not refer our own subsistence, especially in cities, to the rain and the sun and the soil. We do not refer the loaf in our basket, or the meats that smoke on our board to the last harvest. And when we do, we fail often to derive from the changes of nature that lesson which to a pious, to a Christian, mind, they ought to convey.

My brethren, all nature is a book on which one lesson is written, and blessed are the eyes that can read it. On the glorious sky it is writ in characters of fire; on earth it is writ in the majesty of the green ocean; it is writ on the volcanoes of the south, and the icebergs of the polar sea; on the storm, in winter; in summer on every trembling leaf; on man in the motion of the limbs, and the changing expression of the face, in all his dealings, in all his language it is seen, and may be read and pondered and practised in all. This lesson is the omnipresence of God—the presence of a love that is tender and boundless. Yet man shuts his eyes to this sovereign goodness, thinks little of the evidence that comes from nature, and looks upon the great system of the world only in parcels as its order happens to affect his petty interest. In the seasons he thinks only whether a rain or sunshine will suit his convenience. In the regions of the world he thinks only of his farm or his town. Let us lift up our eyes to a more generous and thankful view of the earth and the Seasons.

Do they not come from Heaven and go like Angels round the globe scattering hope and pleasant toil and recompense and rest? Each righting the seeming disorders, supplying the defects which the former left; converting its refuse into commodity and drawing out of the ancient earth new treasures to swell the capital of human comfort. Each fulfils the errand on which it was sent. The faintness and despondence of a spring that never opened into summer; the languor of a constant summer; the satiety of an unceasing harvest; the torpor or the terror of a fourfold winter are not only prevented by the ordination of Providence, but they are not feared; and emotions of an opposite character are called forth as we hail the annual visits of these friendly changes at once too familiar to surprize and too distinct and distant to weary us. It is in these as they come and go, that we may recognize the steps of our heavenly Father. We may accustom our minds to discern his power and benevolence in the profusion and the beauty of his common gifts, as the wheat and the vine. Nor do these seem sufficiently appreciated. We look at the works of human art—a pyramid, a stately church, and do not conceal our pleasure and surprise at the skill and force of men to lift such masses and to create such magnificent forms, which skill after all does but remove, combine, and shape the works of God. For the granite, and the marble, and the hands that hewed them from the quarry, are his work. But after they are builded, and the scaffolding is thrown down, and they stand in strength and beauty, there is more exquisite art goes to the formation of a strawberry than is in the costliest palace that human pride has ever reared. In the constitution of that small fruit is an art that eagle eyed science cannot explore, but sits down baffled. It cannot detect how the odour is formed and lodged in these minute vessels, or where the delicate life of the fruit resides.

Our patient science explores, as it can, every process, opens its microscopes upon every fibre, and hunts every globule of sap that ascends in the stem, but it never has detected the secret it seeks. It cannot restore the vegetable it has dissected and analyzed. Where should we go for an ear of corn if the earth refused her increase? With all our botany how should we transform a seed into an ear, or make from the grain of one stalk the green promise and the full harvest that covers acres with its sheaves. The frequency of occurrence makes it expected that a little kernel, properly sowed, will become at harvest time a great number of kernels. Because we have observed the same result on many trials, this multiplication is expected. But explain to me, man of learning! any part of this productiveness. There is no tale of metamorphosis in poetry, no fabulous transformation that children read in the Arabian Tales more unaccountable, none so benevolent, as this constant natural process which is going on at this moment in every garden, in every foot of vacant land in three zones of the globe.

Go out into a garden and examine a seed; examine the same plant in the bud and in the fruit, and you must confess the whole process a miracle, a perpetual miracle. Take it at any period, make yourself as familiar with all the facts as you can, at each period, and in each explanation, there will be some step or appearance to be referred directly to the great Creator; something not the effect of the sower’s deposit, nor of the waterer’s hope. It is not the loam, nor the gravel, it is not the furrow of the ploughshare nor the glare of the sun that calls greenness from the dust, it is the present power of Him who said ‘Seedtime and harvest shall not fail.’ Needs there, my brethren, any other book than this returning summer that reminds us of the first creation to suggest the presence of God? Shall we indulge our querulous temper in this earth where nature is fragrant with healthful odours and glowing with every pleasant colour? Man marks with emphatic pleasure or complaint the pleasant and the unpleasant days, as if he forgot the uses of the storm, the masses of vapour it collects and scatters over thirsty soils and the plants that were hardened or moistened by the rough weather, forgot the ships that were borne homeward by the breeze that chills him, or in short, as if he forgot that our Father is in Heaven, and the winds and the seas obey