Nature, indeed, is prodigal to the point of embarrassment, filling the air, the deepest reaches of the sea, the whole earth, with seed.  Both men and nature select by means of increase and cancel.  We take many snaps and hope for a good shot. Burton and Bunyan go on and on in search of virtue and a fine line.  The rice we toss at the bride of course resembles the teeming hurray of sperm the groom will soon send after it.  We replace the precision of the bow with the spray of the machine gun.  We rain down bombs and hope something will die.  The vey word ‘nature’ becomes protean, accepting every meaning like a vase’s indifferently yawning mouth.  A possibility seems barely conceived and it is realized somewhere, in some tub or plot or community; for what wave has not been ordered out of the sea by now, and the beach felt its special fall; what thought, what untidy passion, what inane or selfless desire, what quik, what constancy, has not been bitterly or beautifully expressed by this time in the long ranom life of the world? and Emerson’s comfort could have come from that, and sometimes did so (“Man feels the blood of thousands in his body and his heart pumps the sap of all this forest of vegetation through his arteries…”); but the method is also wasteful and reckless and chancy and insecure, like America itself, once the Great Experiment and now just a child’s play (“it runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany”); and what personal satisfaction can be derived from being a genius when that only means you were a lucky pull on the lsots, a brief shower of change? so in one mood Emerson is ready to set himself against Nature, making himself up like a poem (all artifice and calculation), while in another he would grow tall with the implacable instinct of the oak; yet “our moods do not believe in each other,” our moods merely watercolor the world; they will wash out.