I just love this stuff, thanks for the reading materials!
If you like this stuff, you might also be interested in learning about the bigger picture.
A good starting point would be this lecture series from The Great Courses Company (currently on sale for $9.95, there are sales all the time so if you missed it, just check back again):
Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalist Movement
Ashton Nichols, Ph.D. Professor, Dickinson College
Course No. 2598
Finally, and perhaps most important of all, what is the source of our distinctly American way of experiencing ourselves—confident in our value as individuals, certain of our ability to discover personal truths in the natural world, self-reliant in the face of uncertainty and change?
Answers to questions like these are found in and around Boston and the town of Concord, Massachusetts, which became, little more than five decades after the American Revolution, the epicenter of a profoundly influential movement that would reshape many beliefs and make possible the America we know today.
That movement is Transcendentalism. Drawing on an array of influences from Europe and the non-Western world, it also offered uniquely American perspectives of thought: an emphasis on the divine in nature, on the value of the individual and intuition, and on belief in a spirituality that might "transcend" one's own sensory experience to provide a more useful guide for daily living than is possible from empirical and logical reasoning.https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/emerson-thoreau-and-the-transcendentalist-movementAnd here is another classic by William James, a close look at religious experience from a non-religious point of view (free ebook):
Varieties of Religious Experience, a Study in Human Nature
by William James
There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather. https://www.amazon.com/Varieties-Religious-Experience-Study-Nature-ebook/dp/B0082Z598S/ref=sr_1_5?crid=33Q7ZHSQC5M23&keywords=varieties+of+religious+experience+william+james&qid=1696010666&sprefix=%2Caps%2C211&sr=8-5