...under the influence of Europe as the easel pictures. Many years have passed since Emerson wrote : " Our long apprenticeship to the learning of •other lands draws to a close." The "close" has not been reached yet, and it may take longer •than the generation prophesied by Dr. Bode....

...sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be, something else ; when the sluggard intellect of this...something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. . . . Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation, the...

...Francisco Aha California), fully launched his career. Emerson had announced in "The American Scholar" that "our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands" was drawing to a close. Mark Twain's work, no less than that of Thoreau and Whitman, was in a vital...

...past forms, Emerson seems less the apostle of a new American literature than its anticipatory prophet: "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close," he announced toward the beginning of "The American Scholar," concluding with a series of calls that...

...listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe," Emerson said, and he stirred those who heard him. "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to...the learning of other lands, draws to a close." "The American Scholar" explores one of the principal themes of Nature, that modern society has replaced...

...particularly Americans, are ready to slough off the past. Emerson writes in the first paragraph that "our day of dependence, our long 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...

...justly called the American "intellectual Declaration of Independence," Emerson had conjured up a time, "when the sluggard intellect of this continent will...something better than the exertions of mechanical skill."64 He had told the nation in ringing sentences: We have listened too long to the courtly muses...

...this continent will ... fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than . . . mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long...to the learning of other lands, draws to a close." 5 As in language and literature, so also in history: Americans early generated a great deal of historical...

...free from our doctrinal inheritance and opening ourselves fully to the experience of the New World. "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close." We must overcome our longings for distant baubles and come to appreciate, he writes, "the near, the...

...inferiority of US art. Despite the intellectual nationalism of writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson t"Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close"). a fundamental disbelief in frontier culture persisted throughout much of the nineteenth century. 7...