...with the French Revolution. Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it in a statement of literary protectionism, "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to...the learning of other lands draws to a close" ("The American Scholar," in Essays and Lectures [New York: Library of America, 1983], 53). 20 This assortment...

...Emerson was the major advocate of literary and intellectual independence for his country. 'Our days of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close', he proclaimed in 'The American Scholar'. 'The millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot...

...American literature based in kairos: "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" (Essays, 53). The kairos for American letters has arrived, Emerson asserts, and the world is waiting...

...monetary enslavement and cultivate "private obedience to his mind." The time was already approaching when "the sluggard intellect of this continent will...expectation of the world with something better than mechanical skill." 22 How was this monumental change to be effected? Emerson was sure of the answer...

...he called on Americans to free themselves from the dead hand of European culture. He said, "Our long dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands draws to a close. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves." The statement paralleled his...

..."The American Scholar," that American artists and thinkers leave behind the models of colonial Europe: "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close" (Selected Essays, 83). Or Poe's thoughts in his 1842 review of Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales: "As Americans...

...to the learning of other lands, draws to a close" — and at the same time exhorted his audience to "fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill."19 This first decentralizing step was not a complete disavowal of European cultural influences...

...a lesson that Nehru extracts from Emerson by splicing together passages from "The American Scholar" ("our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close") and "SelfReliance" ("the rage for traveling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness"). Nehru abandons...

...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.2 It is an "indestructible instinct," essentially human, to think, and to have thinking flower...

...intellectual leader, carrying his message to lecture halls as well as publishing it in essays. "Our days of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close," he had announced in 1837. "The millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed...