On March 11, 1829, Emerson was ordained as colleague of Henry Ware in the Second Church of Boston and a little later ‘became the sole incumbent.’ He resigned this advantageous post of labor (September, 1832) because of doubts about the rite of the Lord’s Supper and the offering of public prayer. To many observers his career seemed wilfully spoiled by himself.
With impaired health and in despondency and grief (he had but recently lost his young wife)[19] Emerson tried the effect of a year abroad. He sailed from Boston and arrived at Malta on February 2, 1833. Thence he proceeded to Syracuse, Taormina, Messina, Palermo, and Naples. After visiting the other chief cities of Italy, he journeyed to Paris, which he admired none the less because he felt out of place there; ‘Pray what brought you here, grave Sir?’ the moving Boulevard seemed to say. But he had the opportunity of hearing Jouffroy at the Sorbonne, and of paying his respects to Lafayette. In London he saw Coleridge. At Edinburgh he learned Carlyle’s whereabouts, visited him, and found him, ‘good and wise and pleasant.’ He was unfortunate in his trip to the Highlands (‘the scenery of a shower-bath must be always much the same’). He called on Wordsworth at Rydal Mount. In early October he was back at home.
The future was uncertain. Emerson was reluctant to give up the ministry, and preached from time to time as the chance presented itself. For some weeks he supplied Orville Dewey’s church in New Bedford, but when it was intimated that on Dewey’s resignation he might be invited to succeed him, Emerson made the impossible conditions that he should neither administer the Communion, nor offer prayer ‘unless he felt moved to do so.’ He supplied the pulpit of the Unitarian church in Concord during three months of the pastor’s illness and for three years preached to the little congregation in East Lexington.
Having cut himself off from the only ‘regular’ mode of life that seemed open to him, Emerson took up the irregular vocation of lecturer. During the winter following his return from Europe, he had lectured before the Boston Society of Natural History. Beginning in January, 1835, he gave a course on ‘Biography’ consisting of six lectures: ‘Tests of Great Men,’ ‘Michelangelo,’ ‘Luther,’ ‘Milton,’ ‘Fox,’ and ‘Burke.’ During succeeding winters he gave ten lectures on ‘English Literature’ (1835–36), twelve lectures on ‘The Philosophy of History’ (1836–37), ten lectures on ‘Human Culture’ (1837–38), ten lectures on ‘Human Life’ (1838–39), ten lectures on ‘The Present Age’ (1839–40). He was now fairly engaged in his new calling.
Meantime he had fixed on Concord for his permanent home, bought a house there, married Miss Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, and begun that career of which one of his biographers has humorously complained, ‘a life devoid of incident, of nearly untroubled happiness, and of absolute conformity to the moral law.’
In 1836 there was published anonymously a little volume entitled Nature. It was Emerson’s first book. His influence as a man of letters begins at this point. The succeeding volumes consisted in part of lectures which, having stood the test of public delivery, were now recast in essay form. Not every essay, however, had its first presentation as spoken discourse.
On formal public occasions Emerson was often invited to give the address. There was authority in his utterances. That he was not unlikely to say something revolutionary seemed to make it the more important that he should be heard often. He gave the Historical Address at Concord at the Second Centennial Anniversary, the Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard on ‘The American Scholar’ (August, 1837), and the Address before the Senior Class in Divinity College (July 15, 1838), which brought down on him the wrath of Andrews Norton and a shower of remonstrances from Unitarian ministers who, however, loved him too much to be angry with him.
At the time of the Divinity Hall Address the so-called Transcendental movement was in full progress. The movement grew in part out of informal meetings held by a group of liberal thinkers with a view to protesting against the unsatisfactory state of current opinion in theology and philosophy, and looking for something broader and deeper.[20]
Transcendentalism was an intellectual ferment. Having a philosophical and religious significance, it was also notable for its effect on social, educational, and literary matters. Emerson defined it as faith in intuitions. It has been called an ‘outburst of Romanticism on Puritan ground.’ Certain historians connect it with German transcendental philosophy. That it was indigenous to New England appears to be the sounder view. According to a high authority,[21] ‘Emerson’s transcendentalism was native to his mind.... It had been in the life and thought of his family for generations.’ He was certainly regarded as the heresiarch.
Like most complex movements Transcendentalism had a grotesque side. The enthusiasts, in their anxiety to be emancipated from old formulas, fell victims to ‘the vice of the age,—the propensity to exaggerate the importance of visible and tangible facts.’ Emerson laughs at them a little: ‘They promise the establishment of the kingdom of heaven and end with champing unleavened bread or dedicating themselves to the nourishment of a beard.’