Nature

Nature (1836) is the founding text of American Transcendentalism. Emerson published it anonymously, at thirty-three, the year after he had moved permanently to Concord — a slim ninety-page pamphlet that nobody asked him to write and that launched the most distinctive philosophical-literary movement in American history.

The essay is organised in eight short chapters that work outward from the simple practical uses of the natural world to the deepest metaphysical claims about its relation to spirit. The famous "transparent eyeball" passage in the opening chapter is the most quoted single sentence of American Transcendentalism.