Ocean State Libraries

This version of Nature is an 1843 revision to the popular essay written and published in 1836. In the original essay, Emerson put forth the foundation of transcendentalism, and suggested that reality can be understood by studying nature. Within the essay, Emerson divides nature into four usages: Commodity, Beauty, Language and Discipline. These distinctions define how humans use nature for their basic needs, their desire for delight, their communication...

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Ronald Jager's Eighty Acres, a memoir of his boyhood on a Michigan farm, was acclaimed as "a moving evocation of its time and place" (New York Times). In this sequel to Eighty Acres, Jager explores the links between a rural New England landscape and the routines of its human inhabitants, now and in the past. The setting is Washington, New Hampshire, where Jager and his wife bought an abandoned farmhouse nearly thirty years ago. Through the years they...

"Tarka the otter pursues an active life, sometimes playful and sometimes dangerous, in the Devonshire countryside." --

In the Company of Light begins at the end of summer in Maine, when the swallows, harbor seals, and shore birds fly ahead of the "mind's ability to grasp them." Hay writes of the profound engagement of migration, and of the seasonal pull that has him restless to join "the great company of life on the planet." Hay's searching, visionary prose details a wealth of late-summer encounters: with a kingfisher providing "a blue opening into space" and with...