Various - Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 386, December, 1847

when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel his right to it, though he were Cæsar; he cannot feel more right to it, than to the firmament and the splendours of a sunset."

But this dream of love is but one scene in the play; and our author concludes his essay by pointing out what is, or should be, the denouement of the drama.

"Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation and combination of all possible positions of the parties to extort all the resources of each, and acquaint each with the whole strength and weakness of the other. For, it is the nature and end of this relation, that they should represent the human race to each other.

"At last they discover that all which at first drew them together, – those once sacred features, that magical play of charms, was deciduous, had a prospective end, like the scaffolding by which the house was built; and the purification of the intellect and the heart, from year to year, is the real marriage foreseen and prepared from the first, and wholly above their consciousness. Looking at these aims with which two persons, a man and a woman, so variously and correlatively gifted, are shut up in one house to spend in the nuptial society forty or fifty years, I do not wonder at the emphasis with which the heart prophesies this crisis from early infancy, – at the profuse beauty with which the instincts deck the nuptial bower, and nature and intellect and art emulate each other in the gifts and the melody they bring to the epithalamium. Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality, but which seeketh virtue and wisdom every where, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom."

If there is some of the ideal in this account given of love and matrimony, there is, nevertheless, a noble truth in it. And surely in proportion as the sentiment of love is refitted and spiritualised, so also ought the moral culture, to which it is subservient, to be pure and elevated.

The longest essay in the collection, and that which approaches nearest to the more formidable character of a treatise, is that entitled "Nature." This exhibits, so to speak, the practical point of view of an idealist. The idealist has denied the substantial, independent existence of the material world, but he does not deny the existence of a phenomenal world. The Divine Nature reveals itself in the twofold form of finite mind and this phenomenal world. Thus, we believe, we may express the general creed of these philosophers, though it is a very delicate matter to act as interpreter to this class of thinkers: they are rarely satisfied with any expressions of their own, and are not likely to be contented with those of any other person. This phenomenal world has for its final cause the development and education of the finite mind. It follows, therefore, that all which a realist could say of the utility of nature can be advanced also by the idealist. He has his practical point of view, and can discourse, as Mr Emerson does here, on the various "uses" of nature which, he says, "admit of being thrown into the following classes: – commodity, beauty, language, and discipline."

We have not the least intention of proceeding further with an analysis of this essay; as we have already intimated, the value of Mr Emerson's writings appears to us to consist in the beauty and truthfulness of individual passages, not at all in his system, or any prolonged train of reasoning he may adopt. It is impossible to read this production without being delighted and arrested by a number of these individual passages sparkling with thought or fancy; it would be equally impossible to gather from it, as a whole, any thing satisfactory or complete.

On the beauty of nature he is always eloquent; he is evidently one who intensely feels it. "Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, night and the stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows." The shows of heaven and earth are with him a portion of daily life. "In the woods is perpetual youth." "We talk," he says in another place, "with accomplished persons who appear to be strangers in nature. The cloud, the tree, the turf, the bird are not theirs, have nothing of them; the world is only their lodging and table." No such stranger is our poet-philosopher. "Crossing a bare common, in twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. Almost I fear to think how glad I am."

The only quotation we shall make from the Essay on "Nature," shall be one where he treats of this subject —

"A nobler want of man is served by nature, – namely, the love of beauty. Such is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye, that the primary form, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a delight in and for themselves ; a pleasure arising from outline, colour, motion, and grouping. And as the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul, that intense light will not make beautiful. And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath, like space and time, will make all matter gay. But besides this general grace diffused over nature, almost all the individual forms are agreeable to the eye, as is proved by our endless imitations of some of them; as the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the wheat-ear, the egg, the wings and forms of most birds, the lion's claw, the serpent, the butterfly, sea-shells, flames, clouds, buds, leaves, and the forms of many trees, as the palm.

"The influence of the forms and actions in nature is so needful to man that, in its lowest functions, it seems to lie on the confines of Commodity and Beauty. To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney, comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm he finds himself. The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired so long as we can see far enough.

"But in other hours nature satisfies the soul purely by its loveliness, and without any mixture of corporeal benefit. I have seen the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house, from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations; the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind. How does nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria, the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie."

Mr Emerson has published a volume of poems, and it has been generally admitted that he has not succeeded in verse. But there are touches of charming poetry in his prose. This discrepancy, which is not unfrequently met with, must result, we presume, from an inaptitude to employ the forms of verse, so that the style, instead of being invigorated, and polished, and concentrated by the necessary attention to line and metre, becomes denaturalised, constrained, crude, and unequal. We have looked through this volume of poems, but we should certainly not be adding to the reputation of the author by drawing attention to it. If we wished to find instances of the poetry of Emerson, we should still seek for them in his prose essays. Thus he says: —

"In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record, day by day, my honest thought, without prospect or retrospect, and I cannot doubt it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it not. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also. "