Transcendentalism: Selected Works of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Channing

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts—from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this?
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden

This volume contains all of the essential writings of American Transcendentalism. Within are the full texts of Emerson's The Transcendentalist, Nature, Self-Reliance, and Friendship; Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, Walden, and Walking; as well as selected poems by Walt Whitman and William Ellery Channing.