Bowen charged Emerson with offending good taste, and pointed out that there was nothing original in his ideas. He characterized Transcendentalism as "a revival of the Old Platonic school," and criticized the "self-complacency" of Romantic writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his "English adherents," who were major influences on Emerson and the Transcendentalists.
Samuel Osgood, writing for The Western Messenger (January 1837), pointed to the peculiar power of Nature to stir the philosophically unsympathetic as well as devotees of Transcendentalism:
The work is a remarkable one, and it certainly will be called remarkable by those, who consider it "mere moonshine" as well as those, who look upon it with reverence, as the effusion of a prophet-like mind. Whatever may be thought of the merits, or of the extravagances of the book, no one, we are sure, can read it, without feeling himself more wide awake to the beauty and meaning of Creation.
But the generally enthusiastic Osgood could not overlook what he perceived as Emerson's lack of conclusive logic in argument. And Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, herself in many ways the consummate Transcendentalist, in a favorable review of Nature for The United States Magazine and Democratic Review (February 1838), urged Emerson to write another book to clarify the philosophy that the reader could only understand "by glimpses" in Nature, and to expand upon certain of his religious ideas.
To a greater or lesser degree, the reviews of Nature set the tone for the contemporary critical reaction to much of Emerson's later work. Commentators responded to his rhetorical prose and to his philosophical idealism with a sense of exhilaration, which was offset by reservations about the soundness of his philosophy and of his religious views, the derivation of his ideas from German and English writers, his logic, his mysticism, his perceived vagueness, and sometimes the aesthetics of his poetry and his prose. Two of the most commonly appreciated aspects of Emerson's work were his ability to inspire others, to serve as a springboard from which others might attain heights of thought and expression, and his optimism. Respected American critic James Russell Lowell (who in his 1848 satirical poem A Fable for Critics had poked fun at Emerson as an idealistic/pragmatic "mystagogue") vigorously underscored Emerson's inspirational quality in his 1871 My Study Windows: "We look upon him as one of the few men of genius whom our age has produced, and there needs no better proof of it than his masculine faculty of fecundating other minds. Search for eloquence in his books and you will perchance miss it, but meanwhile you will find that it has kindled your thoughts." British poet and literary and social critic Matthew Arnold, who lectured on Emerson in Boston in 1883 and published his lecture in his Discourses on America (1885), denied that Emerson was a great poet, a great man of letters, or a great philosophical writer, but found him insightful, perceptive of truth, and admirable in his inspirational optimism. Arnold wrote: "the secret of his effect . . . is in his temper. It is in the hopeful, serene, beautiful temper. . . . [F]or never had man such a sense of the inexhaustibleness of nature, and such hope."
