The causes of this great literary awakening were in some measure akin to
those which produced the Elizabethan age,--a "re-formation" of religious
opinion and a renaissance, seen in a broader culture which did not neglect
poetry, music, art, and the observation of beautiful things.
The philosophy known as transcendentalism left its impress on much of
the work of this age. The transcendentalists believed that human mind
could "transcend" or pass beyond experience and form a conclusion which
was not based on the world of sense. They were intense idealists and
individualists, who despised imitation and repetition, who were full of
the ecstasy of discoveries in a glorious new world, who entered into a
new companionship with nature, and who voiced in ways as different as
_The Dial_ and Brook Farm their desire for an opportunity to live in all
the faculties of the soul.
The fact that the thought of the age was specially modified by the question
of slavery is shown in Webster's orations, Harriet Beecher Stowe's _Uncle
Tom's Cabin_, the poetry of Whittier and Lowell, and to a less degree in
the work of Emerson, Thoreau, and Longfellow.
We have found that Emerson's aim, shown in his _Essays_ and all his prose
work, is the moral development of the individual, the acquisition of
self-reliance, character, spirituality.
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