The transcendentalist movement hit America full force by the mid 19th century, crafting a passionate spiritual idealism in its wake and leaving a unique mark on the history of American literature. Transcendentalism stems from the broader Romanticist time period, which depends on intuition rather than reasoning. Transcendentalism takes a step further into the realm of spirituality with the principle that in order to discover the divine truth that the individual seeks, he or she must transcend, or exceed, the “everyday human experience in the physical world” (“Elements of Literature: Fifth Course” 146). Nature, the physical world, is seen as a doorway to the divine world; beings can cross over into this divine world by not only observing nature, but also looking within themselves. As a result, individuality and self-assurance are seen as virtues, since they come from the heart of the individual. William Cullen Bryant and his poem Thanatopsis, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s The American Scholar, and Walt Whitman’s A Noiseless Patient Spider all display fundamental characteristics of Transcendentalism.…