...often-cited passages in Emerson's writings are accounts of immediate physical experiences. "Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thought any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to...

...the boat, leaving the dolphin pods breathing at the surface in the near distance. As Emerson wrote: "I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear." We plan to drop in at Blue Hole and work our way toward Blue Corner. Devon says something about the...

...They are the kind of experience that Emerson famously described in Nature when he wrote, "Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a...perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear" (Emerson 1983, 10). Though such experiences are obviously aesthetic in character, they are not designedly...

...grasped, to have its life-currents absorbed by what is given. "Crossing a bare common," says Emerson, "in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky,...a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear."10 Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities. But we of the highly...

...in a thousand years, but is available to the poet in the most rude and ordinary things: "Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a...good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration" (2). Every hour of the day and night and every season, from the bleakest days of February to the endless...

...evident in the much-bruited sketch of an experience of transparency on Concord Common. "Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a...occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed myself to perfect exhilaration." The exhilaration seems to arise from a trompe I'oeil effect: the congruence...

...poet. In Emerson's first book, Nature, he speaks of finding beauty and wisdom in the natural world: In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period so ever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth... In the woods, we return to...

...reported such a moment of transcendence in this well-known passage from his essay "Nature": "Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a...my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, 1 have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration."15 Citing this and other like episodes, James asks, "in what...

...grasped, to have its life-currents absorbed by what is given. "Crossing a bare common," says Emerson, "in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky,...my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, 1 have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear." Life is always worth living,...

...cannot appeal to heaven for authentication. Emerson says in his most famous ecstatic passage: Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a...perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear . . . Standing on the bare ground — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space...