eaders will heartily
agree, confesses his bewilderment, saying:--

"On reviewing what we have already said of this singular work, the
criticism seems to be couched in contradictory terms; we can only
allege in excuse the fact that the book is a contradiction in
itself."

Carlyle says in his letter of February 13, 1837:--

"Your little azure-colored 'Nature' gave me true satisfaction. I
read it, and then lent it about to all my acquaintances that had a
sense for such things; from whom a similar verdict always came back.
You say it is the first chapter of something greater. I call it
rather the Foundation and Ground-plan on which you may build
whatsoever of great and true has been given you to build. It is the
true Apocalypse, this when the 'Open Secret' becomes revealed to a
man. I rejoice much in the glad serenity of soul with which you look
out on this wondrous Dwelling-place of yours and mine,--with an ear
for the _Ewigen Melodien_, which pipe in the winds round us, and
utter themselves forth in all sounds and sights and things; _not_ to
be written down by gamut-machinery; but which all right writing is a
kind of attempt to write down."

The first edition of "Nature" had prefixed to it the following words
from Plotinus: "Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last
thing of the soul; Nature being a thing which doth only do, but not
know." This is omitted in after editions, and in its place we read:--

"A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form."

The copy of "Nature" from which I take these lines, his own, of course,
like so many others which he prefixed to his different Essays, was
printed in the year 1849, ten years before the publication of Darwin's
"Origin of Species," twenty years and more before the publication of
"The Descent of Man." But the "Vestiges of Creation," published in 1844,
had already popularized the resuscitated theories of Lamarck. It seems
as if Emerson had a warning from the poetic instinct which, when it does
not precede the movement of the scientific intellect, is the first to
catch the hint of its discoveries. There is nothing more audacious in
the poet's conception of the worm looking up towards humanity, than
the naturalist's t