Samuel Osgood was a Unitarian minister who edited the influential Transcendental periodical the
Western Messenger and belonged to the Transcendental Club and the Town and Country Club. While living in Louisville, Kentucky in 1836 to 1837, he was responsible for four issues and collaborated on a fifth. Of the over 70 articles he wrote in the
Western Messenger, perhaps the most notable is his review of
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s first published work,
Nature, in which he praises Emerson for being “not such a dreamer on the beauties of the universe, as to forget its material uses.”