of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature . Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. considered to be America's 'intellectual Declaration of Independence'. [1]"   Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson Posted by OrbsCorbs at 11:21