REVELATION, RELATION, AND THE OVER-SOUL

The year 1841 was a high tide for Emerson and the transcendentalist movement. He had begun the year by sending his Essays to the press; he would end it in the midst of his important lecture series in Boston entitled “The Times.” Margaret Fuller was editing the Dial, which was giving the “new views” of the transcendentalists wider circulation and public attention. But these apparent public successes of transcendentalism run counter to the private struggles implicit in Emerson's essays and journals, which suggest the tenuousness of his settlements with doubt. In January 1841, he entitled one journal entry “The Confessional,” a wry allusion to the secret sin of the optimistic transcendentalist: skepticism. “Does Nature, my friend, never show you the wrong side of the tapestry? never come to look dingy & shabby?” Given the celebration of nature in his early work, this confession of doubt is significant. But note how the passage goes on to explain the sudden evaporation of that doubt, an event in which the individual will has no part: “You have quite exhausted [Nature's] power to please & today you come into a new thought & lo! in an instant there stands the entire world converted suddenly into the cipher or exponent of that very thought & chanting it in full chorus from every leaf & drop of water.