CHAPTER V. - Ralph Waldo Emerson - 27 - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Section 3. In the year 1836 there was published in Boston a little book of less than a hundred very small pages, entitled "Nature." It bore no name on its title-page, but was at once attributed to its real author, Ralph Waldo Emerson.Section 1. On Sunday evening, July 15, 1838, Emerson delivered an Address before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, which caused a profound sensation in religious circles, and led to a controversy, in which Emerson had little more than the part of Patroclus when the Greeks and Trojans fought over his body. In its simplest and broadest statement this discourse was a plea for the individual consciousness as against all historical creeds, bibles, churches; for the soul as the supreme judge in spiritual matters.

CHAPTER V.

1838-1843. AET. 35-40.

Section 1. Divinity School Address.—Correspondence.—Lectures on Human Life.—Letters to James Freeman Clarke.—Dartmouth College Address: Literary Ethics.—Waterville College Address: The Method of Nature.—Other Addresses: Man the Reformer.—Lecture on the Times.—The Conservative.—The Transcendentalist.—Boston "Transcendentalism."—"The Dial."—Brook Farm.

Section 2. First Series of Essays published.—Contents: History, Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws, Love, Friendship, Prudence, Heroism, The Oversoul, Circles, Intellect, Art.—Emerson's Account of his Mode of Life in a Letter to Carlyle.—Death of Emerson's Son.—Threnody.