...years after Emerson's oft-quoted ringing 1837 assertion in his "The American Scholar" address that "our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close," Nathaniel Parker Willis perceived danger emerging from the march of American technology.13 Writing...

...England is the South African equivalent of Emerson's earlier call for a distinctly American literature: Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. . . . We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. . . . We will walk on our own feet;...

...national awakening or new birth, as in "The American Scholar": "Perhaps the time is already come . . . when the sluggard intellect of this continent will...something better than the exertions of mechanical skill" (CW1:52). Whether we consider the eye's unsealing in its private or in its public sense, however, it...

...affectation and artifice. His 1837 address, "The American Scholar," captures his goals most clearly. "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands draws to a close," Emerson stated in his opening paragraph, and after summarizing what the true scholarly habitus ought...

...oration delivered in the summer of 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson assured the young scholars in his audience: "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close." Two years later, the nationalistic Democratic Review called the propensity to imitate foreign nations...

...instinct." "Perhaps the time is already come," he continued hopefully, when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this...to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. . . . Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation...

...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. .. . The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around;...

...and distinction for our artists. When Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed in "The American Scholar" that "our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close," he was expressing a wish that had been in the cultural air for half a century." It's hard to pinpoint...

...American Scholar," his criticism had sounded more hopeful. "Perhaps the time is already come . . . when the sluggard intellect of this continent will...something better than the exertions of mechanical skill." But the iron lids of the continent had stayed closed, despite the best efforts of Bryant, Longfellow,...

...after Ralph Waldo Emerson's declaration of American cultural independence in The American Scholar' ('our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands draws to a close. . . . We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe'), even a writer from the banks of the...