...America, and it is this spirit that preserves the republic. Emerson has expressed it in a sentence: "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds." It is undoubtedly true that the largest influence in the development of this spirit came from the Puritans...

...institution. In New England, during August, 1837, Emerson, speaking on " The American Scholar," was saying : " We will walk on our own feet ; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds." But in none of these respects was the South accomplishing much; its every energy was spent in holding...

...bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brother and friends, please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with...

...beginning of "The American Scholar," concluding with a series of calls that echo the Twenty-third Psahn: "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our...letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. ... A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes...

...bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically,...letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defence and a wreath...

...apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close," and in the last paragraph he predicts that "we will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds."21 If "The American Scholar" urges the abandonment of slavish scholarship for the self-reliant...

...stand on its feet, when, in his essay on the American scholar, delivered at Harvard, 1837, he said, "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. A nation of men can exist only when each man believes himself inspired by the divine soul which also...

...bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically,...with our own hands; we will speak our own minds." The American nation was not a nation of Americans. "A nation of men," predicted Emerson, "will for the...

...of intervening authority. Williams simply echoed the credo of an earlier poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson. "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds." Emerson's declaration of cultural independence would work not by fiat but through the conviction of...

...European styles and theories. We have, Emerson wrote, "listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe." "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds" (in Stanton, 1960, p. 84). In the early to mid-nineteenth century, the budding profession of American...