Question

Consider what was happening in the “Gold Rush” article and how it would impact people in that time. Use information to develop a thesis explaining what inspired Emerson to write “Nature”. Use textual evidence from both sections to support your answer.

Answer 1

Emerson wrote Nature as a response to the birth of modernity, an era of possesion and exploitation. While the Gold Rush made thousands of people moved to the west to get rich fast, Emerson writes an essay about the beauty of the unnatainable, an example of this is clearly shown when he writes about the stars:  One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime.

From the historical data we know that "North Carolina's gold-belt counties produced the nation's gold supply from 1803 to 1846." That is clearly a lot of gold, the land in the American West was obviously rich, but as Emerson says: The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.  Meaning that you can own the land, or the weath that it produces, but the true value of all comes from true open-hearted, child-like contemplation, being able "to inegrate all the parts" is the real treasure of man.