Transcendentalism

Coming Soon (Adobe Stock Educational License)

Mary Moody Emerson and CCB

Support of Transcendentalists for GSB poetry

While I am not yet certain if this was written by George or William Burleigh, it reflects the attempted blending of Christianity and Transcendentalism that many nineteenth-century liberals in the United States attempted. There is the sense of eternity being a place of judgment, but now it is non-Calvinist, a destiny that we can control. Vibrations echo from their start through eternity.

SOLEMN THOUGHT.

"We see not, in the life, the end of human actions. Their influence never dies. In ever widening circles it reaches beyond the grave. Death removes us from this to an eternal world—Time determines what shall be our condition oin that world. Every morning when we go forth, we lay the mouldering hand on our destiny, and every evening when we have done, we have left a deathless impress upon our character. We touch not a wire but vibrates in eternity. Not a voice but reports at the throne of God.—Let youth especially, thinki of these things, and let every one remember, that in this this world...it is a serious thing to think, to speak, to act."

The Charter Oak, New Siers 2:13:1 (April 1, 1847).

George is sometimes classed as a Transcendentalist, and this might well be a fitting designation for him at some moments in his output, specifically when he was at his height as a thinker, activist and author, in the mid-1840s to the mid-1850s. The example below, a poem entitled "Primal Music," suggests a universalism beyond the limits of Christianity, and a sanctity of every day life, as well as the self-sufficiency that the movement championed.

Primal Music poem by George Shepard Burleigh

Primal Music, from The Maniac and Other Poems (1849)

In his "Journal of the Little Things of Life," Cyrus M. Burleigh writes of the end of summer in ways that echo Emerson's famous paeans to Nature in all of her various guises. Yet the activist in him brings the discussion back to injustices.

This is the last day of another summer. Its blithe footsteps have hurried along so noiselessly that I have scarcely noted them. Summer with its ten thousand beauties, its verdant fields, its flowery meadows, its warm sunshine & cool shady groves, its bright skies flooded with the light of day, or studded with thousands of undying gems burning with heavenly fire - its sultry heat & its thunderstorms with their lofty grandeur - its beautiful mornings & sunsets rich with the brightest hues of heaven - summer, with its thousands of merry singers making the air to heave with Nature’s own melody - all glad in thy kindness & happy in their freedom, with thy delicious fruits & sparkling waters. With thy blithesome hay-making how I love thee - I do not as in boyhood dread thy labors & look at thy coming as the commencement of a hard & drugding task - but I see in thee types of heavenly beauties & joys - Thou comest with thy hands full of blessings, & with a smile on thy meek face thou geist to all who will accept from thy store of bounties. - Shame that an should snatch thy gifts from his brother & leave him to want while he benefits himself, with his over abundance! But so [it] is with God’s best gifts - a part of his children hoard together what they can never use & what consequently is their curse, & leave others who are weak to starve. Will not the time come “when Man to Man the world all o’er/Shall brothers be for all that”?

Entry of August 31, 1844, from Rhode Island. In "Journal of the Little Things of Life," held by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. This is a rough transcription