Wednesday, May 18

          Sometimes you do find a diamond in the rough.  At the library while looking for a book my wife wanted, my eye glanced to the side at an attractive blue cover in their bargain bin.  Low and behold waiting to be purchased by me for $1 was a gem entitled, The American Transcendentalists, Their Prose and Poetry, edited by Perry Miller by Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957.  I was first hooked by Transcendentalism when I learned about it in my high school English class.  That is when I first read Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.   The book back describes that Perry Miller was an American literature professor at Harvard and also author of the intriguing titled book, Consciousness in Concord. Concord, Massachusetts is where Thoreau and Emerson and other Transcendental writers lived in the early to mid-eighteen hundreds.  My wife and I visited there a few years ago and made pilgrimage to Walden Pond.