Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Donald E. Morse: The End of the World in American History and Fantasy: The Trumpet of the Last Judgement

that at its best it was a mere will of the wisp. "Society never progresses" pronounced Emerson in "Self-Reliance" (279). Thoreau seized on the more concrete, almost sacred inventions of the telegraph and the railroad to convey his point: "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate" (

Waiden 36).

7 Worse, he ridiculed the notion that we have to get somewhere on the highly prized railroad: "We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us" (63). He described himself instead as "a sojourner in civilized life" (1)—a rare figure in the highly energetic, get-up-and-go America of the nineteenth century. Emily Dickinson also vigorously disagreed that humanity was enjoying "the younger day." In her vision of the world, God approves of the death and destruction that she saw all around her from the cemetery behind the house where she lived to the robin on the front walk or to the early spring flowers. A bird came down the Walk

— He did not know I sawHe bit an Angleworm in halves And ate the fellow, raw (328 lines 1-4) Apparently with no surprise To any happy flower The Frost beheads ... it at its play In accidental power

— The blond Assassin passes on

— The Sun proceeds unmoved To measure off another Day For an Approving God.

8 (1024 But rather than sharing Dickinson's vision of omnipresent death, American millenarianism saw the then-current notions of progress as evidence that time's arrow

—along with the humans on it

—was 7 "The wit [in Thoreau's remark] resides in the way means (telegraph) and ends (communicating something important) jostle each other" (Gifford 1 17). s Robert Frost continues this attack on cosmic order in "Design"

—a poem very much in the spirit of Dickinson. 222