An American Prophet of the Natural World

In the early months of 1836, a 33-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson sat in the Old Manse in Concord, gazing down the hill to the Concord River where the Old North Bridge had been swept away by a storm. It was there that he drafted Nature, an essay he hoped would be a spiritual “shot heard round the world.” Concord had been the birthplace of the American Revolution. Emerson’s intent in Nature was to initiate an ongoing revolution of the spirit by attending to the ever-present Divinity of the natural world.