On a spring morning in the Catskill Mountains, an elderly man with a flowing white beard sits beneath a gnarled apple tree, notebook in hand, watching a hermit thrush build its nest. This is John Burroughs in his element—not in a library or lecture hall, but in the cathedral of nature itself. For more than six decades, Burroughs served as America's interpreter of the natural world, transforming simple observations of…
“The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Nature Poets, Transcendentalists, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Peace, Spirituality, Joy
Ralph Waldo Emerson, born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 25 May 1803 and dead in Concord, Massachusetts, on 27 April 1882, became one of the defining voices of nineteenth-century American literature. He was at once a poet, essayist, lecturer, editor, religious dissenter, and public moralist, though no single title entirely contains him. His greatest influence lay in his ability to make philosophical inquiry sound urgen…
“To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Nature Poets, Transcendentalists
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Peace
