Good evening and welcome to boring books for bedtime. I hope tonight's installment provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you get some sleep for once. So lie back,

adjust your volume. Take a nice deep breath and off we go.

This evening we're going to get a little transcendental with nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson,

Emerson, entered according to the Act of Congress in the year 1849

by James Monroe in Company in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts,

published in Boston by Thurston Torion Company, 31 Devonshire Street.

Let's begin.

A subtle chain of countless rings, the next unto the farthest brings. The eye reads omens where it goes, and speaks all

languages the rose, and striving to be man the worm mounts through all the spires of form.

Introduction. Our age is retrospective.

It builds the sepulchres of the fathers.

It writes biographies,

histories and criticism.

The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face.

We, through their eyes.

Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?

Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition and a religion by revelation to us? of season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us and invite us by the powers

they supply to action proportion to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past or put the living generation into

masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new

lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable.

We must trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order

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