ABSTRACT
Ralph Waldo Emerson insisted that civilization and attention to the past are impediments to human contact with nature. Since the beginning of settlement in New France, nature has been an awe-inspiring and dangerous presence in Canada, never absent from the minds of the people. Emerson traveled to Europe in the early 1830s where he met Wordsworth and Coleridge and became a lifelong friend of Thomas Carlyle. He brought the Romanticism of nature back to the United States and turned it into a movement that no European could have imagined. Two important early Canadian writers are Catharine Parr Traill and her younger sister Susanna Moodie, who came from a family of English writers, the Stricklands. They were part of a larger group of upper-class British immigrants, accustomed to the world of Jane Austen and steeped in the poetry of Wordsworth. Both immigrated to Upper Canada in the 1830s and published accounts of their experiences of pioneer living.
