Contents -- 1. Introduction: Transcendentalism and the Orient -- 2. Predecessors: The First Meetings of East and West -- The German Tradition and the East -- The English Romantics and the Orient Fair -- Joseph Priestley: Moses and the Hindoos -- 3. Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, and the Orient -- Emerson's "Asia Mine" -- Thoreau Sauntering Eastward -- Alcott's Universal Bible -- 4. The Dissenters: Melville and Brownson -- Melville as Gnostic -- Orestes Brownson and Tradition -- 5. The Ambience: Orientalism in General-Interest American Magazines -- The Popular Climate West and East -- Concluding Remarks -- 6. Ambience and Embodiment of Transcendental Dreams -- Converting the World -- Images of America's Golden Age -- Transcendental Dreams and Earthly Fiction -- 7. Transcendentalist Periodicals and the Orient -- Literary Religion and Social Reform: The Western Messenger, The Dial, The Present, The Harbinger, and The Spirit of the Age -- The Universal and the Particular: The Cincinnati Dial, The Radical, The Index, and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy -- 8. Patterns in Literary Religion: The Orient and the Second Cycle of Transcendentalism -- Beginnings: Lydia Maria Child and The Progress of Religious Ideas -- Unitarian Transcendentalism: James Freeman Clarke and Elizabeth Peabody -- Universal Religion: John Weiss and Samuel Johnson -- The Sympathetic Universalism of William Rounseville Alger -- Octavius Brooks Frothingham's Religion of Humanity and Moncure Conway's Anthropocentrism -- 9. Conclusion -- Drawing Conclusions in the Drawing Room -- Artists and Asia -- Popular Ramifications -- The Twentieth Century -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.