Ralph Waldo Emerson Asks the Harvard Librarian to Send a Fellow Minister a Book on Observing Nature
Letter ties together the religious, natural and educational elements of the transcendental legacy.
The Transcendentalist movement began among a class of religiously trained, independent-minded thinkers, who rebelled against the establisehd orthodoxy and sought inspiration within themselves and in nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the philosophical foundation of the movement and his address at the Harvard Divinity school helped launch it. Emerson was an alumnus of...
The Transcendentalist movement began among a class of religiously trained, independent-minded thinkers, who rebelled against the establisehd orthodoxy and sought inspiration within themselves and in nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the philosophical foundation of the movement and his address at the Harvard Divinity school helped launch it. Emerson was an alumnus of Harvard, as was Henry David Thoreau later.
The urge to seek inspiration in nature was universal among the men and women who met in Concord. Thoreau's walks, where he would observe life around him, were a subject of Emerson's great admiration. "The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing," he wrote of Thoreau. "If shut up in the house, he did not write at all." He further noted: "He knew how to sit immovable, a part of the rock he rested on, until the bird, the reptile, the fish, which had retired from him, should come back, and resume its habits, nay, moved by curiosity, should come to him and watch him."
H.M. Grout was a fellow, nature-minded minister and friend not only of Emerson but his fellow editor of the Dial, Margaret Fuller. Charles Cutter was a fellow graduate of Harvard and its pioneering librarian, who helped establish a system of cataloguing influential at the Library of Congress.
In this unpublished letter, Emerson writes Cutter at Harvard to send to his friend a book on observing and classifying ants and spiders, a characteristically transcendental enterprise.
Autograph letter signed, Concord, September 5, 1875, to Cutter. "Will Mr. Cutter have the goodness to lend Rev. Mr. Grout, in my name, "Harvest Ants, Trap-Door Spiders," and oblige your obedt servt., R. Waldo Emerson."
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