years he had been writing poetry, but he published no literary work during the term of his pastorate. The poem “Good-bye, Proud World,” incorrectly attributed to the date of his resignation, was written before he entered the ministry. Excepting this piece, little poetry of his early period has been given to the world. He had married, in 1829, Miss Ellen Louisa Tucker, who died in February, 1832. In 1833 he went to Europe for his health, visiting Sicily, Italy, and France, and preaching in London and Edinburgh. At this time he met Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle, forming with the last-named writer an enduring friendship, which is one of the most interesting in literary annals. It resulted in a correspondence, which was continued for thirty-six years, and has been published under the editorship of Charles Eliot Norton (Boston, 1883). Returning to the United States in 1834, Mr. Emerson preached in New Bedford, declined a call to settle there, and went to Concord, where he remained. In the next winter he began lecturing, the subjects of his choice being, curiously enough, “Water” and “The Relation of Man to the Globe.” But he soon found themes better suited to his genius, in a course of biographical lectures given in Boston, discussing Luther, Milton, Burke, Michael Angelo, and George Fox. Two of these were published in the “North American Review.” This course was followed by ten lectures on English literature in 1835, twelve on the philosophy of history in 1836, and in 1837 ten on human culture. Much of the matter embraced in them was afterward remoulded and brought out in his later volumes of essays, or condensed into the rhythmic form of poems. Mr. Emerson married, in September, 1835, Miss Lidian Jackson, of Plymouth, Mass. He then left the “Old Manse,” where he had been staying with Dr. Ripley, and moved into a house on the old Lexington road, along which the British had retreated from Concord in 1775. In this “plain, square, wooden house,” surrounded by horse-chestnut and pine trees, with pleasant garden-grounds attached, he made his home for the rest of his life; and, through his presence there, the village became “the Delphi of New England.” On 19 April, 1836, the anniversary of the Concord fight, Emerson's hymn, composed for the occasion and containing those lines which have since resounded almost as widely as the fame of the deed,
| “ | Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world,” |
was sung at the dedication of the battle-monument.
In September of the same year his first
book, “Nature,” an idealistic prose essay in eight
chapters — which had been written in the same
room of the “Old Manse” in which Hawthorne
afterward wrote his “Mosses” — was published
anonymously in Boston. During the summer he
had supplied the pulpit of the Concord Unitarian
church for three months, and in the autumn he
preached a while for a new society at East Lexington;
but he refused to become its pastor, saying:
“My pulpit is the lyceum platform.” Doubts
had arisen in his mind as to the wisdom of public
prayer, the propriety of offering prayer for others,
and the rightfulness of adhering to any formal
worship. From this time his career became
distinctively that of a literary man, although for
several years he confined himself mainly to lecturing,
and most of his prose writings were first given
to the public orally. Carlyle had said to
Longfellow that when Emerson came to Craigenputtock
it was “like the visit of an angel.” In 1836 he
edited early sheets of Carlyle's “Sartor Resartus,”
and in 1838 three volumes of the same author's
essays, all of these appearing in book-form in this
country before they did so in England, and netting
a comfortable sum for Carlyle. “Nature,” similarly,
met with considerable appreciation in England,
but in the United States it took twelve years to sell
500 copies. The character of the book was both
methodical and rhapsodical. It taught that the
universe consists of nature and the soul, and that
external nature serves four purposes — viz.: commodity,
beauty, language, and discipline. It ministers
to the senses; then to the love of beauty; then it
gives us language — i. e., supplies words as the signs
of natural facts, by which we interpret our own
spirits. Natural laws applied to man become moral
laws; and thus we perceive the highest use of
nature, which is discipline. It trains reason, develops
the intellect, and becomes the means of moral culture.
Thus nature speaks always of spirit, suggests
the idea of the absolute, teaches worship of God,
whom we cannot describe, and shows us that nature
itself is only an apparition of God. “The mind
is a part of the nature of things,” and God is
revealed directly to the soul, spirit being present all
through nature, but acting upon us through
ourselves and not from without. In verbal style this
treatise has great beauty, and rises to the plane of
a prose poem; but the contents perplexed theologians.
The author was accused of pantheism,
though it is hard to see how the belief so named
differs from the professed Christian doctrine of
the omnipresence of God. Most of the practical
people in the community regarded Emerson as
crazy, revolutionary, or a fool who did not know
his own meaning. Ex-president John Quincy
Adams wrote concerning him in 1840: “After
failing in the every-day vocations of a Unitarian
preacher and school-master, he starts a new
doctrine of transcendentalism, declares all the old
revelations superannuated and worn out, and
announces the approach of new revelations.”
The term transcendentalists was somewhat vaguely applied to a number of writers, among whom Emerson was the chief; but they did not constitute a regularly organized group, and had no very well-defined aims in common that could warrant the classification. Emerson himself disclaimed it later, saying “there was no concert of doctrinaires to establish certain opinions or to inaugurate some movement in literature, philosophy, or religion . . . but only two or three men and women, who read alone, with some vivacity. Perhaps all of these were surprised at the rumor that they were a school or a sect, but more especially at the name of 'Transcendentalism.'” Nevertheless, the scholars and writers of the period under notice, who numbered considerably more than two or three, finally adopted the name that had been forced upon them by changing the name of a periodical gathering held by them from the “Symposium” to “The Transcendental Club.” A period of new intellectual activity had begun about 1820, on the return of Edward Everett from Europe, laden with treasures of German thought, which he put into circulation. Gradually his influence, and that of Coleridge and Carlyle in England, produced a reaction against the philosophy of Locke and Bentham, which, denying all innate ideas, and insisting upon purely mechanical revelation, had hitherto ruled Unitarians in Old and New England. The reactionists affirmed the existence of innate ideas, and a faculty in man that transcends the senses and the understanding. Supported by Goethe's deep love of nature as a companion of man, and Wordsworth's conception of it as interfused with spirit, Emerson
