Standing in the woods, Emerson feels himself becoming a transparent eyeball, part of the universal currents of being. This essay, his first book, announced the program of American Transcendentalism: nature as scripture, intuition over tradition, the divine in the ordinary. The prose is aphoristic and visionary, difficult to summarize because it works through assertion rather than argument. Thoreau and Whitman would build on this foundation. The wilderness becomes a source of spiritual renewal, which makes Emerson partly responsible for the national parks and the environmental movement. The eyeball sounds ridiculous. The experience it describes is not.