penetrating inquest into past and present men."

In reply to Carlyle's criticism of the remote and abstract character
of his work, Emerson says, "What you say now and heretofore respecting
the remoteness of my writing and thinking from real life, though I
hear substantially the same criticism made by my countrymen, I do not
know what it means. If I can at any time express the law and the ideal
right, that should satisfy me without measuring the divergence from it
of the last act of Congress."

VIII

Emerson's love of nature was one of his ruling passions. It took him
to the country to live, it led him to purchase Walden Pond and the
Walden woods; it led him forth upon his almost daily walks, winter and
summer, to the fields and the woods. His was the love of the poet and
the idealist, of the man who communes with Nature, and finds a moral
and an intellectual tonic in her works. The major part of his poetry
is inspired by Nature. He complains of Tennyson's poetry that it has
few or no wood notes. His first book, "Nature," is steeped in
religious and poetic emotion. He said in his Journal in 1841: "All my
thoughts are foresters. I have scarce a day-dream on which the breath
of the pines has not blown, and their shadows waved. Shall I not then
call my little book Forest Essays?" He finally called it "Nature." He
loves the "hermit birds that harbor in the woods. I can do well for
weeks with no other society than the partridge and the jay, my daily
company."

"I have known myself entertained by a single dew-drop, or an icicle,
by a liatris, or a fungus, and seen God revealed in the shadow of a
leaf." He says that going to Nature is more than a medicine, it is
health. "As I walked in the woods I felt what I often feel, that
nothing can befall me in life, no calamity, no disgrace (leaving me
my eyes) to which Nature will not offer a sweet consolation. Standing
on the bare ground with my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted
into the infinite space, I became happy in my universal relations."
This sentiment of his also recalls his lines:

"A woodland walk,
A quest of river-grapes, a mocking thrush,
A wild-rose, or rock-loving columbine,
Salve my worst wounds."

If life were long enough, among my thousand and one works
should be a book of Nature whereof Howitt's _Seasons_ should
not be so much the model as the parody. It should contain
the natural history of the woods around my