Transcendentalism

"Standing on the bare ground, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God."

Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803 –1882

"I went to the wood because I wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach...."

*"when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army and subject to military law, then it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize."

Henry David Thoreau 1817 –1862

*Our friend the fugitive... has given image to the dire entity of slavery, and it was an impressive lesson to my children..."

Bronson Alcott

* Louisa May Alcott born in Germantown, Pennsylvania (1832), who started out writing these sensational stories about duels and suicides, opium addiction, mind control, bigamy, and murder. She called it "blood and thunder" literature and she said, "I seem to have a natural ambition for the lurid style." She published under male pseudonyms to keep from embarrassing her family. But in 1867, an editor suggested that she try writing what he called "a girl's book," and she said she would.
The result was Little Women (1868), which was based on her own family and her own experience as an aspiring writer. Alcott was disappointed at how popular Little Women became, because she was obligated to keep writing more books in the same vein.



*Then the little Hiawatha
Learned their names and all their secrets,
How they built their nests in summer,
Where they hid themselves in winter,
Talked with them whene'er he met them,
Called them "Hiawatha's Chickens."
Of all beasts he learned the language,
Learned their names and all their secrets,
How the beavers built their lodges,
Where the squirrels hid their acorns,
How the reindeer ran so swiftly,
Why the rabbit was so timid,
Talked with them whene'er he met them,
Called them "Hiawatha's Brothers."

By: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807 – 1882