ABSTRACT
Ralph Waldo Emerson was reared in nineteenth-century New England, a promising Harvard graduate, one-time Unitarian minister. He gained fame from his literary essays, espousing a spiritual relationship to nature, intuitively known, ultimately an idealism of self-reliance residing in a deeply sacred world. Along with Henry David Thoreau, Emerson was entered among the worthy geniuses of the traditions of which he had been so critical. Two of Emerson's works, similarly titled, introduce his thought. The first is his earlier small book entitled Nature, the original transcendentalist manifesto of 1836. The second is a later essay, 'Nature', published in 1844. Homo sapiens is a microcosm, an epitome or compendium of nature, in whom nature comes to completion. At times, Emerson can seem anthropocentrist: 'All the facts in natural history taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life'.
