Habits of delight and enthusiasm

 In one of the chapters about Emerson's composition of his essay Nature, Richardson writes:

The words that come most readily and most frequently to Emerson as he describes his life in nature are "delight" (used four times at the end of chapter 1 alone) and "wild."  He uses the language of vision and rapture. He speaks of light and delight, of wild delights, of wildness, of exhilaration, of gladness, and of the wild beauty of Shakespeare's unmatchable gift for metaphor. Not only does Emerson accept the Greek idea that the universe is beauty, kosmos, but he emphasizes the experience of that beauty as a wild delight. This inner wildness, this habit of enthusiasm, this workaday embracing of the Dionysian is quintessential Emerson.  He is wild or he is nothing.