“Our age is retrospective,” Emerson observed in 1836. “It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism.” Emerson identified a phenomenon far greater than the literary production of the New England Renaissance. He put his finger on an attitude toward the past that was quite new, yet was imitative rather than provincial and idiosyncratic. The Americans of Emerson's time developed a commemorative consciousness similar to that of the English and French. Following revolutions, all three nations attempted to redefine their pasts in material as well as literary terms. Inspired by Enlightenment philosophy, they considered the processes of nature metaphors for history, and they looked to the Arcadian periods of classical civilizations for precedents of the balanced blending of Art and Nature indicative of a certain sense of the past not associated with their own medieval histories.