Emerson is one of the greatest of essayists. His thoughts have a poetic power. But they are often complex and paradoxical and difficult to understand. The title essay of this collection, Nature is one of Emersons most famous works. In it he in a sense talks about forgetting the fundamentalist reading of Scriptures and finding a true meeting with God through Nature. For Emerson, Nature is the great harmonizer and harmony. He writes of our proper moral relation to it as a way of bringing the divinity into our lives. Emerson makes an analogy between the moral and the spiritual which he claims we can only understand intellectually in proportion to our virtue or the goodness of our character. In writing of Language and Nature he writes that true poetic speech has a command over, and can move and shape Nature. Emerson is famous for his optimistic tone and message, but as Stephen Whicher long ago pointed out Emerson also has a darker side and knows the evils that can come in life.