SOURCE: Miller, Perry. “Perry Miller on Nature and American Nationalism.” In A Century of Early Ecocriticism, edited by David Mazel, pp. 314‐28. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.

In the following essay, which was originally delivered as a speech at Yale University in 1953 and published in the Harvard Theological Review in 1955, Miller explores the importance of the Romantic movement in America's cultural and intellectual development, arguing that one of the consequences of Romanticism was the birth of environmentalism.

On May 8, 1847, The Literary World—the newly founded vehicle in New York City for the program of “nativist” literature—reviewed an exhibition at the National Academy. The magazine had just undergone an editorial revolution and the new management was endeavoring to tone down the strident nationalism of the first few issues; still, the exuberant patriotism of the reviewer could not be restrained, for he had just beheld two exciting landscapes of Staten...