Word: thoreau
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...Capitol, John Kirkland began his brilliant presidency of Harvard (1810-28) which gave the University its Law and Divinity schools, turned out such ornaments of U. S. Literature as Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Hickling Prescott, George Bancroft. At their heels came Oliver Wendell Holmes (Class of 1829), Henry David Thoreau and Richard Henry Dana (Class of 1837). The unbridgeable, bloody chasm between the Northern and Southern traditions was nowhere more evident than in the quiet incredulity with which Henry Adams regarded the son of Robert Edward Lee who was his classmate in the '50s. And the 19th Century...
...date, we are reminded that among the members of the Class of 1910 were both "Jack Reed," the journalist who merited a grave in Moscow, and our conservative Congressman, Mr. Hamilton Fish. Look at some of the Harvard non-conformisas of the past--Theodore Parker, Henry D. Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wendell Phillips, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, James Russell Lowell--abolitionists, religious heretics, champions of women's rights. All were pioneers in a hostile land, yet leaders of movements which today are universally approved. The training of such independent thought is the goal of true education. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said...
...most of their source material the editors relied on second-rate writers, extinct magazines like the Southern Literary Messenger, the Lowell Magazine, the early Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Scribner's, The Congressional Record. Writers like Hawthorne. Emerson, and Thoreau, Sir William observes, were "too English" to contribute much to his compendium...
...generation, yet did not lose his sense of allegiance and duty to his own country as did the later expatriates. At the end he is seen as a dry, superior old aristocrat who still bemoaned the lack of a U. S. literature when Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne, Thoreau were at the peaks of performance...
Brilliant and full of meaning as these portraits are, the great achievement of The Flowering of New England lies in the beautiful discussions of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau. There is a sunlit, morning mood in all Van Wyck Brooks's writing on Emerson, but he has never equaled his new picture of the unself-conscious Sage of Concord who, with his inexhaustible buoyancy and courage, found in the simple life, in disregard for riches, the secret that unlocked his creative genius Of Hawthorne, Mr. Brooks draws a bolder and darker portrait, seeing him as the link between New England...