To prepare for this assignment, I went through each of the midterms from the 2005 class.  In reading them, I found some very similar essays.  Most of the essays had to do with desire and loss/isolation and separation OR color (black, white, and red).  I chose a couple that dealt with the sublime view of nature.  I chose these because they present different ways to look at nature:  the first concerns Jonathan Edwards; the second, although it focuses on Cooper, previews writings about the possibilities of the future of America.

Mary Brooks, February 28, 2005   In the Space Between Rests the Sublime

Jonathan Edwards uses a combination of the sublimity of nature and the sublimity of God in his Personal Narrative.  Edwards describes his experience of finding God’s presence in nature’s “… majesty and meekness joined together: it was sweet and gentle, and holy majesty; and also a majestic meekness; an awful sweetness; high and great, and holy gentleness”.  God being all encompassing is often equated with nature because human comprehension requires that even a vast entity without form be visible. Edwards managed to find his religious peace and center in nature’s plethora of vistas and phenomena.  Edwards uses the sublime to describe nature’s phenomena such as thunderstorms as “…scarce anything, among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightening…and hear the majesty and awful voice of God’s thunder…”.  As often happens with nature’s fury, it is so vast and incomprehensible that a religious component is often added to explain seemingly random events as signs of the sublime in God and nature.  Nature and God in Edwards’ narrative are inseparable.  Edwards finds his sublime religious meaning from being alone in the vastness nature and from encountering all the vast array of phenomena that nature has to hold.

Mary points out that Edwards sees God and nature as One.  This emphasis on the sublime in nature representing God fits in with Objective 1.   

Matt Mayo   Feb 28, 2005   The Heroic Individual of American Romanticism

Colonial America was a fascinating and frightening wilderness, filled with incomprehensible savagery, in the minds of early settlers and European onlookers. The Last of the Mohicans allows the reader to experience this dangerous world vicariously while relishing the heroic deeds of Hawkeye, a “valiant knight of the forest.” Journeying through the colony of New York, still mostly untouched by Western hands, Cooper illustrates through description the experience of being the first to behold the wonders of a new land; Hawkeye leads his companions to Glenn’s Falls, “a spot devoted to seclusion…as they gazed upon its romantic, though not unappealing beauties” (49). Inspired by the wild beauty of the waterfall, Hawkeye articulates a transcendent parable, predicting the natural progression of America itself: “After the water has been suffered to have its will for a time, like a headstrong man, it is gathered together by the hand that made it…flowing on steadily towards the sea…as was foreordained” (55). Tinged with wisdom, Hawkeye’s romantic vision echoes the United States’ “Pledge of Allegiance”: “One Nation/ Under God.” Hawkeye revels in the majesty of the sublime wilderness, and ponders the will of Providence, subsequently concluding that this wondrous land is preordained to be molded and civilized by those of his ilk.

Matt points out that Cooper uses nature as a way to represent a romantic view of a new country.  This vision of the United States as ‘foreordained’ by the ‘will of providence’ fits into Objective 2.

I chose these particular passages because of the vision they gave of nature.  Together, they highlighted the different views of nature, although similar.  Mary, talking about Edwards, points out that Edwards sees God in nature.  Matt, using Cooper, shows that nature can also foretell of an idealized vision of the United States.  In some ways, both Mary and Matt are saying the same thing: that describing nature as sublime can be seen as transcendent – both TO God and TOWARD an idealized future.