ABSTRACT
The new Romantic emphasis on self was accompanied by an emphasis on society, that on nature by a concern with the state of rising industrial culture, that on yea-saying by a current of interrogation and nay-saying. The locomotive, the machine in the garden, inserted history into the landscape and process into transcendent things. This the transcendentalists found hard to accommodate, as Emerson concluded in one of his finest poems in 1847: Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind. Nathaniel Hawthorne was a man who withdrew into imagination and writerly solitude, to suspect that this withdrawal was a social offense which produced a loss of reality and actuality in his nature. Hawthorne is "the divine magnet" to whom "my magnet responds", he explained in the admiring, thoughtful correspondence that now followed. Where Hawthorne discovered ambiguity in the space between imagination and reality, Herman Melville finds it in the strange signals of reality itself.
