Introduction
These pages are an exploration of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s last, great work The Natural History of the Intellect [Full Text]. They are an attempt to make the deeper meaning of the work accessible through visual and written commentaries on the text.
The Natural History is the final fruit of Emerson’s intellectual labor. It is his masterwork, though it remained unpublished in his lifetime. Although it was never published, it was twice presented to audiences through the auspices of the Harvard University Lectures, the precursor of the Graduate School founded in 1872. In both 1870 and 1871 Emerson gave a course of 18 lectures (three per week) under this title.
By the end of the 1871 lectures Emerson was exhausted. He was 68 years old, and the pace of the lectures as well as the necessity of traveling from Concord to Cambridge three times a week had greatly tired him. In their final weeks the frequency of the lectures was accelerated so that they could be concluded more rapidly. As soon as they were done, Emerson was whisked away by friends for a tour of the West, relaxation and rest. It was on this tour, in the area of California that would become Yosemite National Park, that he met John Muir. Muir was a contemporary of Emerson’s, and a writer whose thought complements that of the great man. On May 5, 1871 when these two great souls meet, Muir was thirty three years old and working in a sawmill that he had built.1 This book is a much delayed fruit of that meeting.
Muir’s view of Nature is a wonderful complement to Emerson’s. To both men Nature is a revelation of the divine, but where Emerson sees Nature as a signpost, for Muir it is alive with exhilaration.
One of the most beautiful and exhilarating storms I ever enjoyed in the Sierra occurred in December, 1874, when I happened to be exploring one of the tributary valleys of the Yuba River. The sky and the ground and the trees had been thoroughly rain–washed and were dry again. The day was intensely pure, one of those incomparable bits of California winter, warm and balmy and full of white sparkling sunshine, redolent of all the purest influences of the spring, and at the same time enlivened with one of the most bracing wind–storms conceivable. Instead of camping out, as I usually do, I then chanced to be stopping at the house of a friend. But when the storm began to sound, I lost no time in pushing out into the woods to enjoy it. For on such occasions Nature has always something rare to show us, and the danger to life and limb is hardly greater than one would experience crouching deprecatingly beneath a roof.
[ . . . ]
Toward midday, after a long, tingling scramble through copses of hazel and ceanothus, I gained the summit of the highest ridge in the neighborhood; and then it occurred to me that it would be a fine thing to climb one of the trees to obtain a wider outlook and get my ear close to the Æolian music of its topmost needles. . . . After cautiously casting about, I made choice of the tallest of a group of Douglas Spruces that were growing close together like a tuft of grass, no one of which seemed likely to fall unless all the rest fell with it. . . . Being accustomed to climb trees in making botanical studies, I experienced no difficulty in reaching the top of this one, and never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion. The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobo–link on a reed.
In its widest sweeps my tree–top described an arc of from twenty to thirty degrees, but I felt sure of its elastic temper, having seen others of the same species still more severely tried — bent almost to the ground indeed, in heavy snows — without breaking a fiber. I was therefore safe, and free to take the wind into my pulses and enjoy the excited forest from my superb outlook. The view from here must be extremely beautiful in any weather. Now my eye roved over the piny hills and dales as over fields of waving grain, and felt the light running in ripples and broad swelling undulations across the valleys from ridge to ridge, as the shining foliage was stirred by corresponding waves of air.2
The photographs that illuminate the text were taken mainly in Sequoia National Park during October 2005, though a few were taken in August, October and December 2007 both in Sequoia and Yosemite National Parks. The chief subject is Sequoiadendron giganteum, the giant sequoia of the Sierra Nevada, one of the most remarkable living organisms in the world. The book is linked to John Muir through these trees. Here is his description of this species.
So exquisitely harmonious and finely balanced are even the very mightiest of these monarchs of the woods in all their proportions and circumstances there never is anything overgrown or monstrous–looking about them. On coming in sight of them for the first time, you are likely to say, "Oh, see what beautiful, noble–looking trees are towering there among the firs and pines!"—their grandeur being in the mean time in great part invisible, but to the living eye it will be manifested sooner or later, stealing slowly on the senses, like the grandeur of Niagara, or the lofty Yosemite domes. Their great size is hidden from the inexperienced observer as long as they are seen at a distance in one harmonious view. When, however, you approach them and walk round them, you begin to wonder at their colossal size and seek a measuring–rod. These giants bulge considerably at the base, but not more than is required for beauty and safety; and the only reason that this bulging seems in some cases excessive is that only a comparatively small section of the shaft is seen at once in near views. One that I measured in the King's River forest was 25 feet in diameter at the ground, and 10 feet in diameter 200 feet above the ground, showing that the taper of the trunk as a whole is charmingly fine. And when you stand back far enough to see the massive columns from the swelling instep to the lofty summit dissolving in a dome of verdure, you rejoice in the unrivaled display of combined grandeur and beauty. About a hundred feet or more of the trunk is usually branchless, but its massive simplicity is relieved by the bark furrows, which instead of making an irregular network run evenly parallel, like the fluting of an architectural column, and to some extent by tufts of slender sprays that wave lightly in the winds and cast flecks of shade, seeming to have been pinned on here and there for the sake of beauty only. The young trees have slender simple branches down to the ground, put on with strict regularity, sharply aspiring at the top, horizontal about half–way down, and drooping in handsome curves at the base. By the time the sapling is five or six hundred years old this spiry, feathery, juvenile habit merges into the firm, rounded dome form of middle age, which in turn takes on the eccentric picturesqueness of old age. No other tree in the Sierra forest has foliage so densely massed or presents outlines so firmly drawn and so steadily subordinate to a special type. A knotty ungovernable–looking branch five to eight feet thick may be seen pushing out abruptly from the smooth trunk, as if sure to throw the regular curve into confusion, but as soon as the general outline is reached it stops short and dissolves in spreading bosses of law–abiding sprays, just as if every tree were growing beneath some huge, invisible bell–glass, against whose sides every branch was being pressed and molded, yet somehow indulging in so many small departures from the regular form that there is still an appearance of freedom.3
`
Before proceeding to the pages please read Read this First as it contains an important commentary on this site. This site is a doorway into what Emerson called the "unknown country." The door is open, but you must walk through.
1 William Frederic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir (Boston: The Riverside Press, Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1924), vol. 1.
2 John Muir, The Mountains of California (De Vinne Press, New York, 1894).
3 Ibid.