Emersonian transparency and the anatomy of crystal.

Wilson, Eric

In this essay, I meditate on the riddle of Emersonian transparency, mainly as it appears in Nature. Not pretending to solve the enigma, i offer a fresh perspective from which to study its difficulties. This context is Emerson's interest in crystal shapes. Aware of the important place of crystalline forms--prisms, bits of quartz--in the history of optics, physics, chemistry, and biology, Emerson knew that the limpid lattice reveals powers and structures that in other phenomena remain hidden: the principles of light, electricity, chemical affinity, perhaps life itself. Yet, Emerson also realized from his scientific studies that these energies shining in the geometrical jewel are not simply lawful, not merely predictable and stable. These currents--luminous waves, galvanic forces, molecular polarities, vital pulses--are also obscure, abysmal, beyond the mind. Crystal translucency is opaque; crystal opacity, apocalyptic. If these prismatic virtues inform Emerson's transparency in Nature, then his clarity might be confusion, his revelation may be veiled, his hyaline eye-ball, through which he sees all, could be blind. Emersonian transparency does not open into Neoplatonic lucidity or Newtonian clarity; rather, it vouchsafes blurry, lurid vistas of a sublime cosmos too richly complex to be simply clear.

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Meditating on the mysterious relationship between spirit and matter, Emerson in Nature (1836) pauses to admit that the essence of this connection is frequently an enigma all insoluble: "It is the standing problem which has exercised the wonder and the study of every free genius since the world began; from the era of the Egyptians and the Brahmins, to that of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Bacon, of Leibnitz, of Swedenborg. There sits the Sphinx at the road-side, and from age to age, as each prophet comes by, he tries his fortune at reading her riddle" (N 43). (1)

Emerson's prophetic essay is another attempt to solve this puzzling marriage between invisible and visible. Throughout this first book, Emerson tries to transform the opaque, fragmented cosmos into a "transparent" glass through which might shine the laws, otherwise unseen, harmonizing the universe--Plotinus' concords of soul, the smooth equations of Newton. His primary assumption appears to be: impervious density is illusion, and the true world is transpicuously pervious--intelligible light passing through intelligible light.

Yet, a close look at Emerson's idea of transparency reveals that it, too, is a riddle, a sphinx by the road. Does Emerson, like Plotinus, desire the visible world to pass away before spiritual intelligences? Or does he, like Newton, wish more to convert solids into clear vessels of physical rules? Is the limpidity he envisions insubstantial, mere air, or palpable, solid prism? Is his mode of transmuting opacity to pellucidity intuitive or inductive? Is Emerson a visionary or an optical theorist?

Several astute readers of Emerson over the years have tried to solve these riddles surrounding Emersonian transparency. (2) The reason for these hermeneutical efforts is clear: transparency is one of the keys to understanding not only Emerson's Nature but also his entire canon. To explore Emerson's sense of the transparent is to encounter the main tension agitating his work: between Emerson the transcendentalist and Emerson the naturalist. Examining this rift, one is compelled to decide if Emerson in the end found matter wanting, a thick corruption of blithe spirit, or if he ultimately embraced material events as intrinsically valuable portals to salubrious principles.

Here I take my turn at the riddle of Emersonian transparency, mainly as it appears in Nature. Not pretending to solve the enigma, I offer a fresh perspective from which to study its difficulties. This context is Emerson's interest in crystal shapes. Aware of the important place of crystalline forms--prisms, bits of quartz--in the history of optics, physics, chemistry, and biology, Emerson knew that the limpid lattice reveals powers and structures that in other phenomena remain hidden: the principles of light, electricity, chemical affinity, perhaps life itself. Yet, Emerson also realized from his scientific studies that these energies shining in the geometrical jewel are not simply lawful, not merely predictable and stable. These currents--luminous waves, galvanic forces, molecular polarities, vital pulses--are also obscure, abysmal, beyond the mind. Crystal translucency is opaque; crystal opacity, apocalyptic. If these prismatic virtues inform Emerson's transparency in Nature, then his clarity might be confusion, his revelation may be veiled, his hyaline eye-ball, through which he sees all, could be blind.

In 1832, Emerson recorded in his journal a remarkable entry on the relationship between random energy and cogent form:

There is a process in the mind very analogous to crystallization in the mineral kingdom. I think of a particular fact of singular beauty & interest. In thinking of it I am led to many more thoughts which show themselves [...] first partially and afterwards more fully. But in the multitude I see no order. When I would present them to others they have no beginning. There is no method. Leave them now, & return to them again. Domesticate them in your mind, do not force them into arrangement too hastily & presently you shall find they will take their own order. And the order they assume is divine. It is God's architecture. (JMN 3:316)

Unruly thoughts leap into pristine compositions. Amorphous forces coalesce into pellucid patterns. Both processes--mental arrangement and physical crystallization--are bipolar forms, coincidences of flux and harmony. In their tensions is revealed the divine logic of the universe: disorder hides order; pattern emerges from chaos.

Emerson in other early passages invokes crystalline shapes as especially powerful revelations of the relationship between mysterious energy and symmetrical form. In "Humanity of Science" (1836), he wonders if the fact that the "phenomena of crystallization resemble electric laws" might reveal the "common law that pervades nature from the deep centre to the unknown circumference" (EL 2:29). Likewise, in "The Uses of Natural History" (1833), Emerson marvels at the "formation of snow," finding in its lattices hints toward the principles of chemical formation. The "texture of that self weaving blanket"--comprised of "little hexagon[s]," each featuring "invariable angles" in the "radii" of its "star[s]"--is a "philosophical experiment performed in a larger laboratory and on a more magnificent scale than our chemists can command" (1:15). Emerson further wonders at snow crystals in "Water" (1834). He is amazed that the "invisible water" in the ubiquitous air can so felicitously organize itself into "stars of six rays," "primitive crystal[s]" (1:64). In "The Naturalist" (1834), he celebrates the possibility that the connection between "polarized light" and "crystalline architecture" might reveal one unifying law. Indeed, the integral relationship between waves of light and crystal polarities is--as Emerson claims in a passage deleted from this lecture--as important for his age as the voyage to Plymouth or the Revolutionary War was to earlier times. If crystal patterns reveal the structure of light, then prismatic forms open into light's invisible origins--totally transparent energy. As Emerson intones in an 1841 journal entry, "If I see, the world is visible enough, clothed in brightness & prismatic hues. If again I see from a deeper energy,--I pierce the gay surface on all sides, & every mountain & rock & man & operation grows transparent before me" (JMN 7:435).

The crystal is revelatory. First of all, its structure--a merging of amorphous energy and symmetrical pattern--suggests cosmic morphology: the ways that beings, organic and inorganic, compose distributed flux into cogent configurations. Secondly, the crystal discloses in its limpid windows the concourse of galvanic waves--their nature and function. Thirdly, the crystal's tendency to polarize light--to divide it into double refractions--hints at the bipolar nature of all matter. Finally, through the pied hues spanning the prism, one can sense ubiquitous whiteness, otherwise undetected.

Emerson gleaned these morphological, chemical, optical, and physical conclusions during the 1830s, when he was reading David Brewster's Life of Sir Isaac Newton (1831), John Herschel's A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1832), Humphry Davy's Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812), and Goethe's and Schelling's respective works on morphology. From these texts, he learned that the crystal is a privileged shape--an especially engaging revelation and embodiment of polarities and powers that simultaneously agitate and harmonize the world.

Studying Herschel's Preliminary Discourse, Emerson found the following statement: "the chief of all optical facts" is "the production of colours in the ordinary refraction of light by a prism." (3) According to Herschel, Newton provides an elegant explanation of how distributed, invisible light differentiates into discrete, visible colors. Light for Newton is an unseen diffusion of minute particles, each of which--like all physical particles--is "acted upon by attractive and repulsive forces, residing in all material bodies." These polarized forces deter light particles from their "natural straight-lined course," either repulsing the luminous atoms through negative force or refracting them through positive. When light is bent in this way--repulsed or curved--it spreads into colors. (4) Newton reached this conclusion by passing sunlight through a prism. Described in Brewster's Life, this experiment showed Newton that white light, containing all colors in potentia, spreads into the spectrum based on the velocity of its atoms. Atoms appearing as red pass through the glass at the highest speed; those corpuscles that turn violet transmit at the slowest rate. Particles traveling at intermediate velocities comprise other shades: orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo. (5) Using the prism as a model for the eye, an orb that bends unseen particles into vibrant shapes, Newton thus revealed that colors are tropes, synecdoches: turnings of distributed, invisible light into pied parts.

Herschel emphasizes the explanatory power of Newton's conclusions concerning the prism. First of all, his basic theory of light, confirmed in the transparent angles, enabled him to account for strange phenomena, such as the colors on very thin films--spectrums on soap bubbles or rainbows on air. Newton explained these events by supposing that light particles travel in "fits of easy transmission and reflection." Each luminous corpuscle passes "in its progress periodically through a succession of states such as would alternately dispose it to penetrate or be reflected back from the surface of a body on which it might fall." (6) Brewster explicates. A thin transparent medium, like water or air, reflects or refracts light based on the alignments between the electrical charges of the light particles and the charges of the medium. Revolving around "an axis perpendicular to the direction of its motion," a light particle can approach a refracting medium with either its attractive or repulsive axis directed toward the angle of entry. If the attractive axis first touches the medium, the particle is drawn and refracted. If the repulsive axis initially meets the medium, the particle is repulsed and reflected. (7)

As Herschel further notes, Newton's insights into the prism also confirmed his overarching theories of matter and motion. Scrying in the crystal, he concluded that light, like all matter, is comprised of minute, indivisible atoms, and that light moves, as does everything else, through the agency of gravitational attraction and repulsion. Hence, the "same dynamical laws" that generate and organize planetary motions motivate and structure the color of the rose, and the hues of dreams. Like a Babylonian augur, Newton discovers in his crystal the destiny of the planets and the composition of the stars. (8)

As Emerson additionally learned from Herschel, Christiann Huygens, a contemporary of Newton, accounted for these same optical phenomena with a wave theory of light. Although Huygen's theory came under attack in the age of Newton, it later proved a powerful hypothesis for explaining the polarization of light, yet another phenomena revealed by a crystalline shape. First noted in the late seventeenth century by Erasmus Bartholin, the polarization of light, also known as double refraction, occurs when certain transparent shapes, especially rock crystals, split into two the images they refract. According to Huygens, this effect occurs because light waves traveling through crystal move more slowly than when propagating through air. Densities inside the clear stone divide certain light waves in two and cause one half to travel more slowly than the other. The result of such splitting is two identical refractions. (9) As Brewster notes, Huygen's explanation of double refraction is more elegant than Newton's. Assuming that the crystal is a sieve allowing corpuscles of a certain shape to pass while screening others, Newton clumsily concluded that a doubly refracting crystal allows passage to atoms of light that possess "sides" and therefore project two images. (10)

According to Herschel, few scientists studied light polarization during the eighteenth century. However, as the nineteenth century dawned, scientists returned to the problem. In 1808, Etienne-Louis Malus, an engineer retired from the French army, found that when light strikes any transparent surface at a certain angle, it splits into two images. He concluded that the polarization of light is not an isolated phenomenon but present, in varying degrees, in all refractions and reflections. The degree of polarization is contingent upon the angle of incidence--the site where the ray meets the medium--and that certain angles, called polarized angles, almost always polarize refracted light, even if these polarizations are not visible to the naked eye. (11)

Meanwhile, as Herschel further reports, Thomas Young, an English scientist, and Augustin-Jean Fresnel, a French one, were also explaining why light doubly refracts in transparent surfaces. Inspired by Huygens, Young in 1801 proved that light travels not in particles but waves. In a famous experiment, he shined a beam of light through two adjacent pinholes onto a screen. In certain places on the screen, the beams overlapped, forming in their blendings alternating bands of brightness and darkness. Young concluded that these rays behave like water: crests of light combine to form bigger waves (brighter bands) while troughs meet only to cancel each other out (creating darker lines). Working independently of Young, Fresnel also articulated a theory of wave interference. Invoking this theory to account for double refraction in crystal shapes, Fresnel claimed that most light waves are transverse, comprised of several waves moving in various directions; however, crystals and other transparent surfaces split these multidirectional waves into two unidirectional currents that constitute two equivalent images. Young, working separately, reached the same conclusion at almost exactly the same time. (12)

According to Herschel, these findings--especially developed by the optical work of Brewster himself (who revealed relationships between crystal angles and refractive qualities)--suggest the possibility that the "intimate structure of crystallized bodies" is "closely connected" with the undulation of light. Crystal forms reveal luminous currents, polarized oscillations of crest and trough. Split light discloses the curious virtues of crystal shape--its ability, on the one hand, to diversify unified white light, and, on the other, to simplify multidirectional waves into unidirectional currents. For Herschel, this connection between crystal and light excites "the highest sort of interest--that sort of interest that is raised when we feel we are on the eve of some extraordinary discovery, and expect every moment that some leading fact will turn up, which will throw light on all that appears obscure, and reduce into order all that seems anomalous." This "extraordinary discovery" might be nothing less than the one law underlying all phenomena--the one energy, the one form. (13)

Emerson's passages, cited above, suggest that his studies of the laws of optics and the physics of light intimated these facts. The crystal as prism reveals virtues of white light otherwise unapprehended and also discloses relationships between the one--ubiquitous brightness--and the many--diverse colors. The crystal in the form of clear quartz unveils the polarized, undulatory form of invisible light and thus hints at the possibility that all phenomena might in essence be oscillating waves in varying degrees of velocity and density. In each of these cases, as Emerson realized, the crystal is apocalyptic. Bending (turning, troping) unseen, amorphous energies into vivid, cogent figures, it synecdochally reveals the unbounded whole and its relation to finite parts.

If the optical theorist discovers in the crystal the principles of vision, then the physicist and the chemist apprehend a more fundamental power and form underlying all waves, luminous and otherwise. As Herschel claims in his section on crystallography, the physical and chemical study of crystals, a relatively new science, is extremely important, for it focuses on the ways that "primitive forms" connect with "other forms capable of being exhibited by the same substance, by a certain fixed relation." Hence, in delving into the mysteries of crystal symmetry, crystallography ponders the riddle of all matter--the nature of its monads, their modes of combination. (14)

Crystallographic meditations on matter were initially bogged in Newtonian atomism. In the late eighteenth century, Rene-Just Hauy, one of the first crystallographers, accidentally dropped a crystal. He saw its larger geometry shatter into smaller symmetries, each identical with all the others. After further study, he concluded that crystal forms are aggregates of a set number of primitive structures--crystalline atoms--that combine in mathematically predictable ways. Likewise, even though he criticized Hauy for ignoring the chemistry of crystals, Eilhardt Mitscherlich assumed that crystals are comprised of "particles or atoms." For Mitscherlich, crystals assume different shapes not through the agency of a set number of primitive molecules but rather by way of different chemical compositions. (15)

For Herschel, these theories of crystal, thoroughly Newtonian, are important revelations of the "conception of polarity"--"the perpetual action of attractive and repulsive forces" that combine and separate the essential elements of matter. While one generally associates polarity with the magnetic needle, one can also, as Herschel observes, connect attraction and repulsion with crystallization. To watch minute crystal geometries aggregate into larger symmetries is to observe "little machines" working out the most basic principle of the universe: affinity and repellency. (16)

Yet, as Herschel elsewhere suggests, the crystal might reveal not mechanical atoms but fields of electromagnetic energy--not bits banging in a void but boundless undulations. In his section on magnetism and electricity, Herschel discusses Davy's discovery of chemical affinity in the early nineteenth century. Curious about the composition of seemingly indecomposable compounds, such as alkalis and earths, Davy struck these elements with strong electromagnetic currents. The compounds "yielded to the force applied." Thus, a "total revolution was [...] effected in chemistry," for "chemical affinity" was revealed as a process "due to electric attractions and repulsions." (17) Davy's experiment also opened up the possibility that magnetism and electricity might be interconnected manifestations of a deep force. Hence, Davy's findings worked to account for yet another strange crystalline phenomenon. Certain "crystallized minerals" become electrified when heated. This galvanization causes these transparent stones to behave like magnets, to develop "opposite electric poles at their two extremities." (18)

Emerson did not need Herschel to suggest this non-Newtonian vision of matter, crystalline and otherwise, as a field of an electromagnetic plenum. While he was perusing the Preliminary Discourse, he was also studying Davy's Elements of Chemical Philosophy. (19) In this work, Davy details his 1807 discovery of chemical affinity and speculates on the possible repercussions of this revelation. He wonders if matter might be constituted not by Newtonian atoms but by "physical points endowed with attraction and repulsion." Likewise, he conjectures that the "laws of crystallization" and the "electrical polarities of bodies" are "intimately related": crystal arrangements possibly reveal the structure of universal undulations. (20) Electrified by these hypotheses, Emerson in an early lecture (as we have seen) embraces Davy's theory of chemical affinity and his analogy between crystal and spark as hints of "the central unity, the common law that pervades nature from the deep centre to the unknown circumference" (EL 2:29). (21)

In this same lecture passage, Emerson enthusiastically reports that light and heat and sound are also analogous to electricity and magnetism. All invisible energies of the inanimate world are waves, polarized undulations. All inorganic forms are patterns of an unfathomable unity, a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. In its transparent panels, the crystal reveals all things as limpid geometries of a wispy abyss.

As Emerson learned from Goethe, the biological realm likewise thrives through crystallization, the organization of amorphous vitality into cogent structure. Indeed, in celebrating crystallization as a revelation of the "central unity" emerging from a "deep centre" and expanding to an "unknown circumference," Emerson alludes to Goethe's proclamation in On Morphology (1817-1824): "Nature has no system; she has--she is--life and development from an unknown center to an unknowable periphery." (22) For Goethe, as for Emerson, organic and inorganic, leaf and crystal, are not different in kind but only in degree, in mobility and consciousness. As Emerson observes in an early lecture, Goethe was "much impressed" by the possibility that the "whole force of Creation is concentrated upon every point"--that an unbounded, vital power originates and animates each individual being, regardless of its agility and complexity (EL 1:72).

Studied in Goethe's On Morphology as well as in his Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) and Italian Journey (1786-88), Emerson knew that Goethe's primary scientific idea was this: the cosmos is comprised of a mysterious principle of being, abysmal, that coalesces into recurring archetypal forms. (23) The primal plant pattern is the leaf, a primary structure that organizes unbounded life into the metamorphoses of seed into stalk, stalk into petal, petal into fruit. The archetypal zoological phenomenon is the vertebra, transforming the living abyss over time into toe bones, the spherical skull, the brain. The primitive rock form is granite, which crystallizes the infinite eventually into quartz and emerald. (24) Hence, though nature appears to have no "system," to unfold centripetally from a mysterious core to an ungraspable circumference, the universe is in fact structured by centripetal powers, cohesions of formlessness, Urbilden. (25) The abyss organizes itself into geometries, variously mobile: round bone, eye of leaf, and quartz spheroid. Each event is a crystallization of the whole, an architecture of chaos.

While reading Goethe in the 1830s, Emerson also became aware of Schelling. (26) In his works on Naturphilosophie, Schelling develops Goethe's scientific ideas into a striking vision of a cosmos fully crystal. In Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797), Schelling claims that an abysmal Absolute explores its own mysteries by emanating into a dialectical universe, comprised of interactions between infinite and finite, subject and object, irritation and satisfaction, attraction and repulsion. Generated by such oppositions, each form of this cosmos is both a polarized pattern of this invisible principle and a marker of this principle's developing consciousness of itself. (27) For Schelling, the most primitive form of this abyss is the crystal. A bipolar pattern of inanimate forces--positive and negative charges--the prism reveals spirit at its lowest level of consciousness and thus comprises the ground from which more complex, more conscious patterns grow. Plants transform the crystal's galvanic polarity into irritation and satisfaction; animals transmute the plant's agon into a more dynamic interplay between subject and object, organ and environment; humans convert the struggle with habitat into the interplay between finitude and the infinite. Each level contains and transcends the levels that comprise it. Crystals are early humans. Humans are advanced crystals. (28)

If optical theorists from Newton and Huygens to Young and Brewster frame the crystal as a lucid revelation of enigmatic light and inorganic polarity, galvanically-minded chemists like Davy and biologically-motivated thinkers like Goethe and Schelling exhibit the crystalline form as a disclosure of cosmic vitality and organic structure. In both cases, the limpid stone--crystal as optical speculum, crystal as primal pattern--performs several apocalyptic functions, revealing on several levels relationships and potencies otherwise veiled. The crystal suggests an anatomy of crystalline exposures, each of which constitutes a lens for reading Emersonian transparency.

First of all, the crystal is a window through which one beholds holistic energies otherwise hidden. Divulging to a seer immanent powers, the crystal is further a mirror: it shows an observer depths of his own being formerly unapprehended. As mirror and window, the crystalline shape is also a limen. Refracting white light into diverse hues and polarized exposures, manifesting galvanic force as bipolar waves, the crystal is a boundary between one and many, invisible and visible, matter and spirit. Reflecting to an observer these relationships hiding in his very bones, the crystalline shape merges subject and object, self and other. A blurring of numerous oppositions, the crystal, despite its clarity, is in addition a labyrinth. Transparent and opaque, cool geometry and fervid flickering, the crystal is as likely to confuse as to enlighten, as prone to be scried by the amazed diviner as it is to be measured by the staid scientist. Bending mysterious energies into shifting shapes, the crystal is additionally a trope, a turning of unseen complexities into attractive forms. As a poet torques lubricious feelings into symbols, so the prism curves viewless waves into rainbows. A part standing for and disclosing the whole--a synecdoche--the prism is moreover an eyeball, an ordinary and extraordinary way of seeing. Like a normal eye, the prismatic form refracts and reflects bland light into vivid shapes; like a microscope or telescope, this same crystal structure discloses connections formerly imperceptible. Finally, an uncommon eye, the crystal is a numinous microcosm. It reveals with special power what is always true of everything else. Just as a tornado suggests that everything, no matter how static, is an eddy of immense force; just as the Communion intimates that all beings, no matter how quotidian, are wondrous vessels of spiritual blood: so the crystal hints this--all events are crystallizations of the absolute.

In a key passage in Nature, Emerson invokes this latter revelation of the crystal. He claims that all events, correctly viewed, are transparent revelations of the whole.

 To the senses and the unrenewed understanding, belongs a sort of
 instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature. In their
 view, man and nature are indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates,
 and they never look beyond their sphere. The presence of Reason
 mars this faith. The first effort of thought tends to relax this
 despotism of the senses, which binds us to nature as if we were a
 part of it, and shows us nature aloof, and, as it were, afloat.
 Until this higher agency intervened, the animal eye sees, with
 wonderful accuracy, sharp outlines and colored surfaces. When the
 eye of Reason opens, to outline and surface are at once added,
 grace and expression. These proceed from imagination and affection,
 and abate somewhat of the angular distinction of objects. If the
 Reason be stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces
 become transparent, and are no longer seen; causes and spirits are
 seen through them. (N 62)

To the man who employs only his empirical faculty, his Understanding, the world is comprised of opaque bits, hunks of discrete matter. Wherever he looks, there is only density--thick boundaries. Yet, if this man activates his Reason, his intuitive power, then he apprehends things not only as outlines and surfaces but also as permeable portals, transparent conduits through which invisible causes and spirits circulate.

Emerson's account of intuitive vision and cosmic transparency raises several difficult questions, provocatively addressed, as we shall see, by the anatomy of crystal. When one transforms opacity into transparency, does opacity fall entirely away? Does one then behold only faint lines and viewless air? Or, does opacity somehow remain, forcing the seer to practice a double vision, to value, equally, impervious matter and pervious spirit? In sum, does the transparent vision apocalyptically annihilate the physical world and thus apprehend only a metaphysical realm; or does this way of seeing strike a balance between palpable and impalpable? One further wonders about the nature of the "causes and spirits" that course through the cosmos. Are these energies Neoplatonic harmonies hiding behind material corruptions? Are they smooth Newtonian laws, numbers and equations on the move? Or, are these energies double, troubling--turbulent and ordered, reassuring and obscure? In other words, does Emerson's vision of transparency yield clarity or enigma? What is at stake in these questions is more than Emerson's theory of transparency. Also in play are his sense of matter and his idea of spirit, his ostensible idealism and his possible naturalism.

Emerson's first mention of "transparency" in Nature begins to address these questions. In his initial chapter, Emerson claims that the arrangements of the stars sometimes make the atmosphere appear to be "transparent" with "design," and thus "give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime" (N 9). This claim is contradictory: the stars reveal both design--plan, purpose, pattern--and sublimity--boundless, strange, asymmetrical power. How can astral transparency open to order and the lack of order? A few sentences later, Emerson seems to answer: sidereal formations "awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are always inaccessible" (10). Stars are both discernible and abysmal, present and absent, something and nothing. Making the horizon "transparent," they intimate clear meaning and the erasure of signification, limpidity and obscurity.

As Emerson explains in the next clause, all "natural objects," "when the mind is open to their influence," "make a kindred impression" (N 10). This claim suggests, again, that each event, seen in Reason's light, is a transparent conduit to mysterious powers. Later, Emerson elaborates. When an observer beholds the connection between mind and matter--material events are visible forms of mental laws--"the universe becomes transparent, and the light of higher laws than its own, shines through it" (43). Yet, these bright laws are occult occurrences. Expressing his wonder at the cosmos turned limpid, Emerson asks, quoting Macbeth: "Can these things be/ And overcome us like a summer's cloud,/ Without our special wonder?" Significantly, Macbeth delivers these lines just after he has seen the ghost of Banquo. This ghost, a "horrible shadow," is a dark revelation of the crime and guilt Macbeth has attempted to repress. (29) A return of ignored energy, possibly supernatural, this specter strikes Macbeth with wonder, as would a summer cloud--bright and veiled, sunny and misty. For Emerson, this same sensation overwhelms the visionary of the transparent cosmos. When the world becomes glass, the laws that shine through combine enduring light and ephemeral gloom, reassuring design one would like to remember and unsettling turbulence that one all-too-often forgets.

Aptly, after likening transparency to ghostly opacity, Emerson claims that the revelation proffered by the translucent universe--the relationship between mind and matter (invisible and visible, one and many, subject and object)--is as riddling as the sphinx. Among the enigmas surrounding this unveiling is the nature of matter. On the one hand, matter appears to be an intrinsically valuable pattern of spirit, for there "seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms." Yet, on the other hand, this material realm is also the "scoriae," refuse or dross, of an eternal mind (N 44). Is matter integral or superfluous? This question is complicated when Emerson claims that matter is a "mirror," a glass that reflects the moral and intellectual nature of man (41, 44). If this mirror is a proper circumference of spirit, then it purely reflects invisible powers. But if this glass is a corrupt copy of eternity, then it distorts and confuses.

Where are we? We have learned that matter, properly viewed in Reason's eye, is a transparent window in which otherwise invisible energies appear. Revealing these currents, matter as translucent plane further discloses their nature. They are accessible--gorgeously arranged--and inaccessible--boundless, ungraspable. The cosmos become limpid moreover makes apparent relationships between mind and matter. In the hyaline window, a limen between oppositions, one recognizes that palpable forms are elegant manifestations of a spiritual consciousness and murky degradations of this same eternal intelligence. To encounter these relationships in the universe turned transpicuous is to feel wonder over labyrinthine imbrications of opaque gloom and pristine lucidity, laws and ghosts. Moreover, matter is a mirror in which one beholds interior, invisible laws reflected in exterior, visible structures. Viewing his reflection in the world's glass, he sees through the frame to holistic energies coursing through everything. He thus apprehends relationships between subject and object. Watching inner energies shine in outer forms, he beholds a synecdoche, a visible part standing for the invisible whole. This trope, a refraction of unseen to seen, is earth's eye--a vision of open secrets. In sum, a material event become transparent pattern is a numinous microcosm--a revelation of what is true of everything else, though hidden: each being is a torqued form of an abysmal principle of being, a paradoxical solution of cosmic mystery.

Recalling crystal, Emersonian transparency is not pure transparency. It is not pristine clarity, unadulterated spirit, unsullied invisibility. It is not Plotinus' realm of ideal intelligence, where "all is transparent, nothing dark, nothing resistant; every being is lucid to every other, in breadth and depth; light runs through light." (30) It is not the bloodless abstraction of Newton's quantifiable essentials of matter: numerical masses and motions, extensions and hardnesses. (31) Emerson's transparency is crystal transparency. (32) Not forsaking the concrete for the abstract, the visible for the invisible, it blends conceptual light and perceptible colors, flickering part and unseen whole. Not opening to clean harmonies devoid of agitation, it reveals vast polarities, mutually interdependent oppositions--turbulence and pattern, nothing and something, brightness and shadow, self and other. Not idealist vision or scientific mechanism, Emerson's hyaline glass doubly exposes beings for what they are: convolutions of an ungraspable potency.

Emerson overtly renders these revelations of the crystal in the two remaining invocations of transparency in Nature: the "transparent eyeball" passage and the sequence on the "axis of vision."

In the latter case, Emerson meditates on how the correspondence between inner and outer dictates the nature of vision: "The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent but opake [sic]. The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself' (N 91). Emerson here draws on Brewster's and Herschel's respective descriptions of Newton's theory of "fits of easy transmission and reflection." (33) Recall: a transparent medium--a crystal or prism, a soap bubble or moist air--reflects or refracts light based on the alignments between the electrical charges of the light particles and the electrical charges of the medium. Organized by positively- and negatively-charged axes positioned at right angles to each other, a revolving light particle can approach a medium with either its attractive or repulsive axis directed toward the angle of entry. If the attractive axis first touches the medium, the particle is drawn and refracted. If the repulsive axis initially meets the medium, the particle is repulsed, reflected.

Translating physical to spiritual, Emerson supposes that proper seeing requires a "coincidence" of internal and external. If the observer is at odds, if he egotistically resists the distributed energies sustaining him, then he is "negatively" directed to himself and the world. The cosmos appears to him as an opaque wall. However, if the beholder agrees with his being, if he charitably consents to his unique patterning of universal currents, then he is "positively" disposed. The universe becomes a pervious crystal.

A man coinciding with the prismatic cosmos recognizes this: he is himself a crystalline being, a polarized geometry of ubiquitous energy. As Emerson continues, a "man cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit. Love is as much its demand, as perception. Indeed, neither can be perfect without the other. In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep" (N 91). Only when a man apprehends that he is a pattern of holistic spirit can he behold things turn into limpid revelations of cosmic unity. To achieve this apocalypse, he must possess double vision. On the one hand, he requires the sight of the naturalist, which sets subjects against objects and thus acknowledges differences between self and other. On the other hand, he needs the insight of the lover, who embraces the world as the same, who recognizes only identity between other and self. Attaining such double refraction, he grasps that his being and all other beings are discrete forms of a distributed power, gatherings of geometry and abyss. Deep calls to deep. Crystal, shape of air, merges with crystal, airy form. The cosmos becomes an immense labyrinth of windows and mirror, symbols and eyeballs--each of which reveals the All.

Emerson crystallizes these general meditations early in Nature, in the "transparent eye-ball" sequence. Crossing in cloudy twilight a bare common, covered in snow puddles, Emerson metamorphoses into a diaphanous outline of spirit: "Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God" (N 12-13). Walking over slush--water spangled with stars of ice--Emerson experiences himself as a crystal, a transpicuous lens through which boundless forces oscillate. His axis of vision coincident with the axis of things (his eye of Reason opened), he realizes that his being, properly viewed, is not autonomous and separate, not a self-contained ego, but a discrete geometry of distributed energy, a pervious orb of abysmal currents.

As a crystal organization of unseen power, a window to life, he is also a prism capable of refracting viewless light. Bending the invisible circulations of Universal Being into a visible pattern, an eye-ball, and thus revealing the infinite origin and polarized structure of the cosmos, Emerson as prism is not only a threshold between one and many, invisible and visible. He is also a synecdoche, a point partaking of and disclosing the unbounded. Aptly, this trope takes the form of an eye possessing special virtues: x-ray vision, the ability to see vital pulses behind solid surfaces; and infra-red sight, the power to visualize potencies otherwise dark. Transparently refracting, Emerson also opaquely reflects. Otherwise, he would not be able to see "all," or anything else. A blind eye is unable to reflect light; an acute orb mirrors the world. Drawing and repulsing the universe, Emerson as crystal is an intricate, labyrinthine interpenetration of self and other, identity and difference, light and darkness, nothing and something.

Apocalyptic and obscure, a surreal coincidentia oppositorum, Emerson as eye is not a freak of nature. Rather, in throbbing between antinomies, he numinously discloses the oscillations organizing his entire environment, and perhaps the whole cosmos. He proves a convoluted part of a torqued whole. The common over which he treks is slushy, liquid and solid. The time is twilight, day and night. The sky, obscure and clear, is cloudy yet opens to infinite space. The blithe air, spirit, bathes, as matter. These local tensions mimic global currents and circulations, tensions between positive and negative, crest and trough. Emerson turned crystal reflects his haunt: a crystalline cosmos.

A labyrinthine trope of the arabesque whole, Emerson renders his striking vision in crystalline style--lucid and obscure, unified and divided, intricate as a labyrinth. His transparent eye-ball passage is itself a synecdoche. It is what it is about. Notice the first sentence of the passage, already quoted above: "Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes." Enacting in language the transformation of ego into "nothing," Emerson employs a dangling modifier. He does not provide the subject, "I," that the phrase "[s]tanding on bare ground" clearly modifies. The 'T' falls away. Yet, it immediately reappears in another form: "I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God." How can Emerson's visionary self be both nothing and something, formless and formed? Moreover, if he is a purely transparent lens, and thus unable to reflect light (and thus is blind), how can he see anything, much less everything? Either he is totally transparent and therefore both blind and clear-sighted; or he is simultaneously transparent and opaque, and hence actually capable of sight. We further ask: as a "current" of the "Universal Being," is this visionary a physical flow, an electromagnetic current, or a divine power, a spiritual draft? Finally, why is the visionary "part or particle" of God? If a part, is he then a synecdoche of God, a cogent pattern revealing and containing the whole? If a particle, is he a speck or fragment broken from a whole, and thus separate from God? (34)

These stylistic disturbances, like the vexations surrounding crystal transparency, are not easily calmed. Like the crystalline forms they reflect, these linguistic patterns both signify and de-signify. They suggest rich harmonies--reconciliations of the one and the many, stasis and change. They hint at unhealable rifts--irreducible gaps between spirit and matter, order and chaos. Paradoxical and contradictory, these verbal crystals leave the attentive reader wandering in a luminous gloom, on a threshold between confusing light and darkness that reveals.

Holding darkness in the midst of light, Emerson's sense of the transparent--intimated by his arabesque style as well as by his labyrinthine content--suggests a tentative conclusion: reading Emerson's Nature requires (at the very least) double vision--double refraction. On the one hand, the book opens into the harmonies of Plotinus and Newton's laws. Yet, on the other, this same essay remains an intractable mystery, an unsettling mixture of concord and turbulence, mystery and rule. As Thomas Carlyle once said, Emerson's "little azure-colored" book is indeed an apocalypse, a lucid unveiling of essential truths. (35) However, as Frances Bowen remarked at about the same time, the piece is also a "disturbed dream" inspiring "fits of severe meditation." (36) Both men are right. When one contemplates Nature in a certain mood, one finds an elegant, stable, eternal geometry organizing the painful flux of time. The world seems simple, manageable, good. Yet, in another disposition, one discovers in the book deeps dissolving into deeps, flickering riddles combusting into more horrifying enigmas. The universe turns labyrinth. If Nature is Kenneth Burke's "happiness pill," it is likewise John Jay Chapman's crystal cabinet, whose prisms "sparkle in the mind" or "get driven into your mind like nails." (37)

From the angle of crystal vision, Nature is, strangely, transparent, a revelation of what Emerson calls nature's "open secret [...] not translateable into words" (EL 1:78). By contrast, the former version of the book is opaque, an obfuscating simplification of insoluble mystery. Viewing the crystalline Nature as a double exposure of riddling transparency and comforting opacity, one further realizes that the essay cannot be reduced to simple categories. Valuing matter as an essential and gorgeously prismatic revelation of spirit, the piece cannot be called simply "Neoplatonic" (even though Emerson draws from Plotinus for his epigraph to the 1836 edition). Peering through material events to an enigmatic abyss, it cannot be termed merely "naturalistic" (regardless of the essay's primary question: "to what end is nature?" [N 6]). Not exclusively an idealist treatise, not solely an empirical study, Nature is both at once. Like the crystal, it blends the discernible shapes of matter and the contingent quivers of spirit. In the book's crystal cosmos, the idealist turns the world to glass only through detailed observation. He becomes a hyaline eye only through closely registering snow-puddles at twilight. Likewise, the naturalist grasps the meaning of events only through knowledge of the whole. He turns interpreter of facts only through envisioning universal currents.

Suggesting a middle way between mystery and solution, abyss and pattern, thinking and thing, Nature as crystal asylum, despite its insoluble riddles, at the very least suggests a definite hermeneutical mean: when interpreting Emerson, one must take a double road, a highway that accommodates both fact and spirit. Emerson's claim, "Nature is the symbol of spirit," is not idle. It is the ruling principle of his work. From Nature to "Fate," Emerson translates physical process into metaphors for spiritual energy, and spiritual intuitions into tropes for material facts. Reading Emerson, one should engage in the same transmutations, assuming that a concrete scientific context underlies abstract metaphysical speculation. The chemistry and physics of electromagnetism likely underlie Emerson's invocations of "currents." The burgeoning sciences of life probably inspire his paeans to "metamorphosis." Astronomical immensities and geological durations are perhaps behind his notion of the "sublime." Beneath his theory of "transparency," disturbing its purity, is crystallography: sphinx-like prisms, pieces of quartz, and stones that grow.

Wake Forest University

Notes

(1) In citing Emerson, I use the following abbreviations:

EL The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed.
 Stephen E. Whicher and Robert E. Spiller, 3 vols.
 (Harvard UP, 1972).

JMN The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph
 Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman, Ralph H. Orth
 et al., 16 vols. (Harvard UP, 1982).

N Nature: A Facsimile of the First Edition, Introduction by
 Jaroslav Pelikan (Boston: Beacon, 1985).

(2) There have been several excellent readings of Emersonian transparency. See, for instance, Barbara Packer's Emerson "s Fall: A New Reading of the Major Essays (New York: Continuum, 1982), 57-84, which brilliantly reads Emerson's idea of transparency through the lens of Blake's myth of the fall as well as through the perspective of Newton's optics; Lee Rust Brown's The Emerson Museum: Practical Romanticism and the Pursuit of the Whole (Harvard UP, 1997), 42-58, which interprets Emerson's sense of transparency as a pragmatic tool for seeing through particular events to more powerful universal concepts; James M. Cox's "R.W. Emerson: The Circles of the Eye," Selected Papers from the English Institute: Emerson, Prophecy, Metamorphosis, and Influence, ed. and foreword by David Levin (Columbia UP, 1975), 57-82, which reads fully the nuances of Emerson's "transparent eye-ball" passage; Richard R. O'Keefe's Mythic Archetypes in Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Blakean Reading (Kent State UP, 1995), 29-68, which analyzes Emerson's transparency in light of Blakean vision; and Eric Cheyfitz's The Trans-Parent: Sexual Politics in the Language of Emerson (Johns Hopkins UP, 1981), 1-35, which reads Emerson's notion of the transparent as a key concept in sexual politics. Each of these readings has significantly informed my own; however, none has focused on the possible role of crystallography in Emerson's famous passage.

(3) John Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, foreword by Arthur Fine (U of Chicago P, 1987), 252. As we know from Emerson's sermons, Emerson had read Herschel's book by 1831, when he compared it favorably to Milton's Paradise Lost (The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 4 vols, ed. Albert J. von Frank et al., [U of Missouri P, 1989-92], 4: 157). For a history of the study of light insofar as it relates to crystals, see Vasco Ronchi, The Nature of Light: An Historical Survey, tr. V. Barocas (Harvard UP, 1970), 160-208, 237-41; and Carl B. Boyer, The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics (Princeton UP, 1987), 233-39, 251-58, 282-87.

(4) Herschel, 250.

(5) John Brewster, The Life of Sir Isaac Newton (London: John Murray, 1831), 22-28. Emerson was reading Brewster's Life as early as 1832 (JMN 3:326). In his journal of 1833, he quotes Brewster quoting Newton on the "law of light" (4: 87). Packer in Emerson's Fall notes Emerson had a copy of Brewster's biography, with "autograph and notes," in his library (238).

(6) Herschel, 253. For Newton's own discussion of his optical theory insofar as it relates to the prism, see Newton, Opticks, Great Books of the Western World, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 404-9.

(7) Brewster, 70-78.

(8) Herschel, 250.

(9) Herschel, 250; Brewster, 108-9.

(10) Brewster, 108-9. For Huygens's description of his theory of double refraction, see Traite de la Lumiere, Great Books of the Western World, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 579-606. For Newton's account of his theory, see Newton, Opticks, 524.

(11) Herschel, 258-59. See also Etienne-Louis Malus, Theories de la double refraction de la lumiere dans les substances cristallisees (Paris: Baudoin, 1810), 219.

(12) Herschel, 260-62; Brewster, 103-6. See Thomas Young, "An Account of Some Cases of the Production of Colors, Not Hitherto Described," Philosophical Transactions, XCII (1802), 387-92. Also consult Young's Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts, 2 vols. (London, 1807), 1: 470, 2: 643.

(13) Herschel, 259.

(14) Herschel, 240.

(15) Herschel, 240. See Rene-Just Hauy, Essai d'une theories sur la structure des crystaux (Paris, 1784), passim; Hauy, Traite de Mineralogie, 5 vols. (Paris, 1801), 1:19-109, 2:249-55; and Eilhardt Mitscherlich, "Ueber die Kristallisation der Salze in denen des Metal der Basic mit zwei proportionen Sauerstoff verbunden ist," Abhandlugen der koniglichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin (1818-19), 427-37. For a history of this segment of crystallography, see John G. Burke, Origin of the Science of Crystals (U of California P, 1966), 86-106; 120-33.

(16) Herschel, 245.

(17) Herschel, 339.

(18) Herschel, 339.

(19) Emerson read Davy's work assiduously throughout the late 1820s and early 1830s, and praises the scientist often in his journal and early lectures. For a detailed discussion of Emerson's relationship to Davy in particular and the science of electricity in general, see Eric Wilson, Emerson's Sublime Science (London and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's, 1999), 76-97.

(20) Humphry Davy, Elements of Chemical Philosophy, vol. 4, The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. John Davy (London: Smith, 1839-40), 39-40.

(21) As I show at length in my forthcoming book, The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination (New York: Palgrave Press of St. Martin's Press), another possible influence on Emerson's senses of crystal (as well as on Thoreau's) is Emanuel Swedenborg. Before he became a prophet blown by his visions of heaven and hell, Swedenborg was a chemist, engineer, and metallurgist. In his first book, the 1721 Principles of Chemistry, Swedenborg discusses the formation of ice and salt crystals in ways that predict the work of Hauy and Davy alike. Indeed, an anonymous article in the New Jerusalem Magazine 8 (Nov. 1839), 118-19, entitled "Swedenborg's Scientific Merit" and probably read by Emerson, reports that Jean-Baptiste Andre Dumas praised Swedenborg as the originator of crystallography.

(22) Johann Wolfgang yon Goethe, Scientific Studies: Collected Works, vol. 12, ed. Douglas Miller (Princeton UP, 1988), 43.

(23) Emerson was reading Goethe's scientific works closely in the 1830s. For a discussion of Emerson's relationship to Goethe's science, see Wilson, Emerson's, 61-67.

(24) Goethe, 76-97; 111-16; 131-35.

(25) Goethe, 43-44.

(26) This 1835 journal entry suggests that Emerson knew of either Schelling's Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797) or his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800)--or perhaps both--for he accurately summarizes Schelling's main tenets: "The Germans believe in the necessary Trinity of God,--the Infinite; the finite; & the passage from Inf. Into Fin.; or, the Creation. It is typified in the act of thinking. Whilst we contemplate we are infinite; the thought we express is partial & finite; the expression is the third part & equivalent to the act of Creation. Unity says [Bohmean] Schelling is barren. Duality is necessary to the existence of the World. Shall I say then that the galvanic action of metals foreshows from afar the God head, the zinc the metal & the acid; or the marriage of plants the pollen the ovary, & the junction?" (JMN 5:30).

(27) F.W.J. Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, tr. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath, Introduction by Robert Stem (Cambridge UP, 1988), 17-18, 44-49, 83.

(28) Schelling, Von der Weltseele (Hamburg, 1798), 189, 219. For a discussion of Schelling's crystallography, see Burke, 149-51.

(29) Macbeth, 3.4.135-37.

(30) Plotinus, Enneads, tr. Stephen Mackenna, Introduction by John Dillon (New York: Penguin, 1991), 414.

(31) Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and System of the World, tr. Andrew Motte, rev. Florian Cajori (U of California P, 1934), 398-400; in Newton: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. I. Bernard Cohen and Richard S. Westfall (New York and London: Norton, 1995), 117.

(32) While here I am mainly interested in the ways that Emersonian transparency corresponds to crystallography, I should note that Emerson in Nature on two occasions mentions "crystal." Though he does not single out the crystal as an especially numinous shape, he nonetheless does associate it with revelation of the spirit and relationship between microcosm and macrocosm. In the first instance, he notices the crystal, along with several other forms, as a gist of the moral laws pervading nature: "Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, motion, that every globe in remotest heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life; every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of the leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine; every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments" (N 51). In the next instance, Emerson casts the crystal, again, along with other natural shapes, as a microcosm of the macrocosm: "The fable of Proteus has a cordial truth. Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world" (54-55). Surely it is significant that in both cases, Emerson invokes the crystal in tandem with the leaf. This correlation suggests that Goethe's archetypal morphology is somewhere in back of these glances at crystal. Likely, Emerson saw in the crystal a primal organic form--the archetype of inorganic matter.

(33) Packer in Emerson's Fall (72-84) brilliantly discusses the relationship between this passages and Emerson's reading of Brewster's Life of Newton. I follow her ideas closely here.

(34) As I noted in Emerson's Sublime Science (193), several of Emerson's strongest readers have noticed in Emerson's prose the unsettling, turbulent, galvanizing qualities that I here locate in the transparent eye-ball passage. John Burroughs, writing of Emerson's style in 1877, claims that it is "akin to that elusive but potent something we call electricity" (Birds and Poets, with Other Papers [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895], 192). William James, one of Emerson's most sensitive readers, said in 1903 that Emerson's greatest achievement was as an "Artist" because his "matchless eloquence.... electrified and emancipated his generation" ("Address at the Emerson Centenary in Concord," Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Milton R. Konvitz and Stephen E. Whicher [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962], 20). More recently, Barbara Packer has observed that Emerson's essays, especially Nature, were characterized by "ambiguities, lacunae, paradoxes, and understatements" so "generously" placed that the sentences in his essays are "charged terminals that the reader must take the risk of connecting," the reward being a "certain electric tingle" (Emerson's Fall, 6). Where F.O. Matthiessen senses in Emerson's prose a "multiplicity of ... conflicting statements," Eric Cheyfitz feels a palpable "volatility" (American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman [Oxford UP, 1941], 3; The Trans-parent, xii). Emerson's sentences, Alan Hodder writes, are as dynamically attractive as atoms, jewels, or plants (Emerson's Rhetoric of Revelation: Nature, the Readers, and the Apocalypse Within [Penn State UP, 1989], 121). Lawrence Buell agrees. He concludes that Emerson's style exhibits an "unpredictable, vigorous fecundity" (Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance [Cornell UP, 1973], 161).

(35) Thomas Carlyle, The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Joseph Slater (Columbia UP, 1964), 157.

(36) Francis Bowen, "Uncertain and Obscure," in Emerson's Nature: Origin, Growth, and Meaning, ed. Merton M. Sealts, Jr., and Alfred R. Ferguson (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1969), 82.

(37) Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (U of California P, 1966), 186; John Jay Chapman, "Emerson," quoted in Milton R. Konvitz, ed., The Recognition of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Criticism Since 1837 (U of Michigan P, 1972), 108.