Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

If the influence of Calvin can be seen as a taproot of early Americanconsciousness, perhaps it is time to acknowledge Coleridge’s crucial role asa light that led leaf to flower, in what Van Wyck Brooks called, “The Floweringof New England, “in what F. O. Matthiessen called “The AmericanRenaissance,” the extraordinary gift to world literature. Coleridge’s inspirationpersevered a couple of decades into the works of Emerson, Thoreau,Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson, and appeared longafter geographical, religious, political, legal, and economic independence.It is also time to acknowledge the role, in bringing that light to America, oftwo little-known Congregational ministers, James Marsh and Horace Bushnell,who helped to make possible how our American artists could think,imagine, and write, beyond the confines of the church. Marsh and Bushnellhelped the early American mind to alter, so that Hawthorne’s scarlet lettercould evolve, could mean variously, so that Melville’s doubloon in MobyDick could be read so many different ways by so many different people.Endnotes1. Miller, Perry, ed. The American Puritans. Anchor Books, 1956, p. 267.2. Ibid., p. 266.3. Ibid., p. 304.4. Faust, Clarence and Thomas Johnson, ed. Jonathon Edwards. Hill andWang, Inc., 1935, p. 164.5. Frazier, Charles. Cold Mountain. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997, pp. 298–99.6. Gura, Philip. The Wisdom of Words. Wesleyan University Press, 1981,p. 18.7. Ibid., p. 41, note 18.8. Coleridge, S. T. From Aids to Reflection. Aphorism IV, Selected Poetry andProse of Coleridge, ed. Donald Stauffer, Modern Library College Editions,1951, p. 530.9. Gura, p. 45, note 32.10. Ibid., p. 53, note 54.11. Ibid., p. 60, note 72; God in Christ, pp. 22, 24.12. Ibid., p. 63, God in Christ, p. 55.13. Ibid.157