Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self Reliance, Henry David Thoreau's Where I Lived and What I Lived For, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Dr. Heidegger's Experiment and Herman Melville's Moby Dick are all considered to be models of timeless writing. Each author was skilled but each wrote with their own tone. There are both parallels and disagreements between these writer's tones.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to inspire and to change the thought process of the everyday man, in hopes that society would improve. He is intensely critical of society as a whole, but believes that a man can change himself. He wrote with an encouraging tone that was also insightful to common behavior. Emerson was generally sanguine but was also pragmatic as necessary. His works incorporate a personal tone which helps to relate the reader and author. Many common aphorisms are excerpts from his work.

Henry David Thoreau also used a personal tone...