SOURCE: "America's First Romantics: Richard Henry Dana, Sr. and Washington Allston," in The New England Quarterly, Vol. XLV, No. 1, March, 1972, pp. 3-30.

In the following excerpt, Hunter addresses Dana's early espousal of romanticism and his later conversion to evangelical Christianity.

Like so many writers and artists of their generation, Dana and [Washington] Allston inherited a world view at odds with the one they adopted in their early manhood. They were torn between a traditional body of ideas which assumed the existence of universal truths and the exciting but private psychological visions of Coleridgean idealism. Unable to reconcile a yearning for the subjective intuitions of the imagination with this culturally imposed need for truths verified by universal experience, they became mired in uncertainty. How could they achieve the absolute moral and metaphysical knowledge enjoined both by the lingering Puritan tradition and by the natural law philosophies of the Enlightenment...