In the following essay, Tanner explores the transcendentalist creed: using an "innocent" eye to "see God in all things."

A hostile American reviewer of Wordsworth noted that 'he tries to look on nature as if she had never been looked on before' and he bemoaned that fact that the poet seemed to be attracting an 'ever increasing school of devoted disciples' in America. Now, what he blames Wordsworth for accurately sums up the ambition of many of the Transcendentalists. There is no need here to disentangle the indigenous emotional drive from the imported European ideas in Transcendentalist thought. But it is important to stress how eager the Transcendentalists were to develop a new attitude towards nature, a new point of view. Picking up the Wordsworthian hint they developed it for their own purposes. Thus Parker echoes Wordsworth in describing the correct way to respond to the world...