Published anonymously in 1836, Nature is the founding statement of American Transcendentalism and the essay in which Emerson first set out the ideas that shaped a century of American thought. Moving from the plain uses of the natural world through beauty, language and discipline to the idealism of its closing chapters, it argues that nature is not merely scenery or resource but the visible expression of spirit — and that every person may meet it directly, without the mediation of tradition or church.
It contains the famous passage of the transparent eyeball, standing on bare ground with all mean egotism vanished, and the insistence that our own age should enjoy an original relation to the universe rather than grope among the dry bones of the past. Thoreau read it at Harvard and went to Walden; Whitman read it and found his subject. Short enough to be read in an evening, it remains one of the most consequential essays ever written in America.