Throughout his life, Emerson's thought and work generated mixed reactions — sometimes entirely positive or negative, but more often a combination of the two. Many found aspects of his approach radical and unsettling, even when they were moved by his optimism about man's place in the universe. This dichotomy is found in writings by those of Emerson's contemporaries inclined to defend Transcendentalism as well as by those who had no particular sympathy with it. When Nature appeared in 1836, for example, Orestes Brownson (Unitarian preacher, editor, reviewer, and writer for The Christian Examiner and the Boston Quarterly Review) wrote about it in the September 10, 1836, issue of the Boston Reformer. He opened the piece, "This is a singular book. It is the creation of a mind that lives and moves in the Beautiful, and has the power of assimilating to itself whatever it sees, hears, or touches. We cannot analyze it; whoever would form an idea of it must read it." He proclaimed the book "the forerunner of a new class of books, the harbinger of a new literature as much superior to whatever has been, as our political institutions are superior to those of the Old World." Having defined Nature as "aesthetical rather than philosophical," Brownson went on to question the logical soundness of Emerson's denial of the existence of nature as a reality independent of spirit and the human mind: "He all but worships what his senses seem to present him, and yet is not certain that all that which his senses place out of him, is not after all the mere subjective laws of his own being, existing only to the eye, not of a necessary, but of an irresistible Faith."
The more conservative Francis Bowen, a critic of Transcendentalism, likewise admitted the power of Nature, but expressed a number of reservations. In a lengthy review ("Transcendentalism," written for the January 1837 issue of The Christian Examiner), Bowen stated, "We find beautiful writing and sound philosophy in this little work; but the effect is injured by occasional vagueness of expression, and by a vein of mysticism, that pervades the writer's whole course of thought." He continued:
The highest praise that can be accorded to it, is, that it is a suggestive book, for no one can read it without tasking his faculties to the utmost, and relapsing into fits of severe meditation. But the effect of perusal is often painful, the thoughts excited are frequently bewildering, and the results to which they lead us, uncertain and obscure. The reader feels as in a disturbed dream, in which shows of surpassing beauty are around him, and he is conversant with disembodied spirits, yet all the time he is harassed by an uneasy sort of consciousness, that the whole combination of phenomena is fantastic and unreal.
