Aside from two modest-sized works from a literary output that numbered more than one hundred items--including reviews, essays, books, and prefaces--Sampson Reed is largely remembered for tirelessly working to promote the doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) within New England Transcendental circles and to establish the New Jerusalem Church in America. What slight literary reputation Reed currently enjoys rests on two short works, "Oration on Genius" (1821) and Observations on the Growth of the Mind (1826); these works, however, are themselves largely remembered less for their own merit than for the impetus they gave Ralph Waldo Emerson to pursue a literary career and, more especially, for providing him with the vocabulary and concepts that significantly inform his writings from Nature (1836) to the end of his career. Through his readings in Reed, Emerson absorbed some specifically Swedenborgian doctrines, most notably the existence of a universal "correspondence" between the natural and spiritual realms...