Though neither voluminous nor widely popular, the work of James Marsh captures the relation of the cultural outburst of nineteenth-century New England to American Puritanism. More Puritan than Ralph Waldo Emerson's works and more romantic than Jonathan Edwards's, Marsh's writings specify the crucial distinctions to be drawn between these writers, distinctions that the myth of national identity has long obscured for students of American culture. In his simultaneous embodiment of the Puritan and romantic, expressing both, yet blind to his own internal conflicts, Marsh dramatizes the forces that moved Americans away from accepted ideologies and into new conceptions of the mind that gave a revolutionary direction to American letters. Marsh's work was engaged in sorting out the issues that fathered the American renaissance, and the complex relation between the intentions behind that work and its consequences reveal the hidden stress points, the fault lines where Puritan and Transcendentalist...