Thus, while Carlyle, bold, versatile, shrewd, untrammeled, worked upon the Unitarian element in America, Coleridge, evangelical, polished, yet adventurous, leavened the Congregationalists and other shades of orthodox Christians with the same result. But the first literary outgrowth and original product of the Transcendental movement in America was Emerson's Essay on Nature, which appeared in 1838, forming a nucleus for the writings of the Dial-ists, and proving a sort of _prolegomena_ to the new edition of Hermetic Philosophy. '_Non est philosophus nisi fingit et pinxit_,' said the great pioneer. Here Emerson does both, proving, by inversion, his claim to the title. Whatever may be the negative virtues of this preliminary essay, it undoubtedly possesses the positive one of having given a strong impulse to the study and love of Nature. True, the man who is to grasp its details, sympathies, significations, to hear, in all their grand harmony, its various discordant symphonies and fugues, to see its marvelous associations, needs to be Briarean-armed, Israfel-hearted and Argus-eyed, as perhaps none in our imperfect day and generation can claim to be. But at least this 'Nature' of Emerson's insinuated, dimly and dreamily, in spite of its positive air, an occult relation between man and Nature. It invested rock and sky and air with new and startling attributes. The deep thinker might even draw upon its pages some _pays-de-Cocagne_ landscape, flowing indeed with milk and honey, but in Tantalian distance. Nature's true heart is invested with a pericardium so thick that it resists the scalpel of the skillful critics, to whom the stethoscope alone betrays the healthful throb of vitality beneath. With portly arguments, Emerson bars the door to the simple but earnest-hearted. That Nature, whose prophet he is, gleams, bright and unloving, down from a cold, unsympathizing heaven. 'Not every one doth it beseem to question The far-off, high Arcturus.' And we, the lazzaroni on the piazza, can not even see the sky for the mist of 'mottoes Italianate and Spanish terms' of an effete logic that has risen before it.