SOURCE: Marx, Leo. “Two Kingdoms of Force.” In The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, pp. 227‐353. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964.

In the following excerpt, Marx argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson's ideas about nature are informed by American pastoralism and philosophic idealism.

Three months before the episode in Sleepy Hollow, Ralph Waldo Emerson published “The Young American,” a version of an address originally delivered in Boston on February 7, 1844. Here Emerson speaks in his public voice as prophet of the American idyll. Combining a vivid, Jeffersonian sense of the land as an economic and political force with a transcendental theory of mind, he expounds what may be called the philosophy of romantic American pastoralism. No major writer has come closer to expressing the popular conception of man's relation to nature in nineteenth‐century America.

By the time he composed Nature (1836), his first published work of...