Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1836)

Cross a bare common at twilight, the snow still standing in the puddles, nothing lucky in your day, and feel a gladness rise that borders on fear: this is where Emerson begins. Then comes the sentence that started a literature. Standing on open ground, his head bathed in the blithe air, he feels the small self dissolve until he is nothing and sees everything, a transparent eyeball through which the currents of the universe pour. _Nature_ is the founding document of American thought, the essay that told a young country it need not borrow its religion or its poetry from the Old World, because the woods past the door were scripture enough. Emerson wonders what we would do if the stars came out one night in a thousand years, how we would believe and adore, then reminds us they come out every night and we have stopped looking up. Read it and you start looking again.