The following excerpt is from the Ralph Waldo Emerson entry in A Journey Through Literary America:

Stimulated by the good clear air of the coming winter and the strong beer and talk in the taverns, he began to feel like himself again—or, rather, more than himself. When he paused from his writing in the second floor study of the Old Manse, he could spy a little bridge over the Concord River through the bottle-thick glass. At that very spot, the “shot heard round the world” that started the American Revolution had been fired. For a man whose thoughts were bent on achieving an intellectual revolution in the New World, there could have been no more inspiring sight.