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Several months after Hawthorne's “Foot-prints on the Sea-shore” appeared in the January, 1838 Democratic Review, Elizabeth Peabody brought a copy to Emerson, who recorded in his journal the next day, “I complained that there was no inside to it.” Emerson's cool reaction notwithstanding, “Foot-prints,” along with a number of Hawthorne's other sketches and extended descriptions of nature, rewards much closer reading if we are interested in his complex aesthetic and philosophical responses to landscape. In fact, Hawthorne's depictions of nature reveal a particularly “inside” view, reflecting and inviting the meditative, contemplative response to nature articulated by Kant and embodied by the group of 19th-century American painters we now know as the luminists. His notebooks are filled with detailed descriptions of landscape, clouds, and light; some are almost specific enough to sound like painters' verbal sketches to be consulted later in the studio. While he frequently mentions Claude Lorrain and the picturesque tradition, his close attention to nature betrays a profound interest in elements that were to become the focus of the luminists in the 1850s and 1860s. Prolonged consideration of a landscape or seascape seems to lead Hawthorne significantly beyond the available, almost codified aesthetic of the picturesque to a way of representing nature and the individual's relationship to it that is more subjective, meditative, and open-ended. Hawthorne's later reactions to specific paintings, especially those of J. M. W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, also suggest strongly that he would have found a far closer match to his sensibilities in many of the canvases of the luminists, especially Martin Johnson Heade and John Frederick Kensett, than those of his more immediate contemporaries, Thomas Cole and the other Hudson River School painters.

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