Emerson's Nature

Emerson's Nature "...bears personal witness to core truths about the self and the world, or consciousness and nature. And if the book is at some points compatible with Christianity, it is at least as compatible with classical Stoicism. Nature must be compared not only with the great twelfth chapter of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria and with Carlyle's Sartor Resartus but also with the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and the Enchiridion of Epictetus. But even those famous little books are mainly self-help guides, officers' manuals for the warfare of living the just life, so Emerson's Nature may even more fitly be compared to Lucretius's De rerum natura--which Rolphe Humphries translated The Way Things Are."

--Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind On Fire, 226.