...I could count on, truth that spoke to my heart, that registered in my brain, that made some sense? "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" Emerson asked. "Why should not we have... a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?"...

...to a distinct imaginative, and more specifically literary, culture for the United States by asking: "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" As opposed to Lincoln's political path, for Emerson neither the fixed Constitution nor any other institution...

...role of the natural world order in religion. In his essay on "Nature," Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? .... Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us and invite...

...the sepulchers of the fathers," he asserts in the first lines of Nature, and famously goes on to ask "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" 32. Emerson, Journals, undated entry of September 1842. (7). Emerson's scorn for retrospect, sepulchers,...

...saying that our forefathers beheld God and nature "face to face; we, through their eyes," Emerson asks, "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" This "also" — as in the next assertion, that the "sun shines to-day also," which presupposes an earlier...

...their faces preserved, their lives memorialised. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in 'Nature', regretted that 'Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of...should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?'21 He spoke, it turned out, not just for a confrontation with the natural world but for a...

...central tenet of Transcendentalism: "The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face. . . . Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" Indeed, much of Transcendentalism can be summed up as the individual's quest for an "original relation...

...even as it also helped to inspire modern democracy. Emerson asks in his first book, Nature (1836), "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" (7). American democratic wildness often stems from that very impulse, anarchic, desocialized, religious,...

...willfulness, Emerson began Nature with a blunt challenge to the past, which meant for him the dead: "Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of...also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" The need was great for a direct, unmediated experience of the divine: "Why should not we have a poetry...

...Nature. it was something basic to intellectual life that had once been articulated, but now was lost: Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of...their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?24...