Happy birthday, Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the birthday of writer and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803), who is best remembered as the leader of the Transcendentalist movement, which revered the individual over the institution in society and culture, particularly organized religion and political parties. Emerson espoused the idea that people are at their best when they are independent and self-reliant. Emerson's essay Nature (1836) is considered a key document in expressing Transcendentalist ideas. In it, he suggested that mankind can only understand reality by studying nature. In a speech titled The American Scholar (1837), Emerson declared: "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds … A nation of men will for the first time exist because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which inspire all men."