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This is the homepage of our virtual //American Literature Museum.//

Here are the proposed rooms of our museum. In each room you will find examples of American Art and Literature. Each curator has created a room, combining excerpts from American literature (prose and poetry) with modern music, painting, sculpture, photography, furniture, as well as other decorative and folk arts to explore a theme from the literature that we have studied this year.

//Ralph Waldo Emerson// 1803-1882 Excerpts from his essay: **Nature** Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

//Frederic Church// 1857 Oil on canvas 42 1/2 x 90 1/2 in. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington Connection Turn the Corner
 * Niagra**