Charles Eliot Norton's aim throughout his career was to demonstrate how literature and art could serve as moral exemplars for the United States. Intimately connected by birth and associations to Ralph Waldo Emerson's generation, Norton worked to continue the shift in New England culture from mercantile and theological concerns to literary, intellectual, and reformist ones. His primary legacy to this earlier generation of New England writers was to preserve and publish the documents of its intellectual development, especially those of Emerson and James Russell Lowell.

Norton's friendships with Emerson and with John Ruskin, and his actions as a go-between for Emerson and Thomas Carlyle, made him an especially important witness to the contacts between American and European Romanticism. At the same time, Norton was far more pessimistic about the possibilities for human progress than the American Renaissance generation had been. Insisting that faith in self-reliance must be tempered...