Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

The sentence comes in the first chapter of Nature, where Emerson describes the delight that fields and woods give to a receptive mind: “They nod to me and I to them.” But this power, he adds, “does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both”, and such pleasures must be used with temperance: the same scene which yesterday “breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs” is overspread with melancholy today. The line states the rule, and examples follow: to a man labouring under calamity, “the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it”, and he who has just lost a dear friend feels a kind of contempt for the landscape.

Emerson, a former Unitarian minister living in Concord, published the little book anonymously in 1836; it is the founding text of American Transcendentalism, and the same chapter holds his famous vision of becoming “a transparent eye-ball”.

The line is quoted as a compact statement of the Romantic idea that the world we see reflects the mind that sees it.

Nature, chapter I, 1836

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work