The clerical life of Emerson was a distinct era, marked by originality and independence in the young divine. His first and only settle rnent was at the Second Church of Boston, which had been Cotton Mather's, and was Henry Ware's when Emerson was ordained as a colleague in 1829. He became sole pastor in 1830, and in the meantime had married a deli cate young Bostonian, Ellen Louisa Tucker, who died in 1832. In 1833, upon a point of doctrine concerning the rite of the Lord's Supper, in which he found himself at variance with his deacons, he preached a sermon gently setting forth his scruples and resigned his place, much against the wish of his people. But he had been and despondent since the death of his wife and the illness of his brother Edward; and a foreign tour was prescribed for him, which broke the continuity of his preaching, although he continued to officiate in pulpits here and there for some six years after his first visit to Europe. Miss Elizabeth Peabody, who had often heard Emerson preach, said at the Con cord School of Philosophy in 1883: From 1834 I never omitted an opportunity of hearing Emerson preach. I sought and obtained leave to read the sermons he lutd in manuscript. They were all as truly " transcendental " as any of his later writings in prose or verse. If a volume of them could be printed to-day in their own form it would interpret his later revelations, of which they are but a varied expression. From first to last he never shut in his vision of the living God to the limitations of his own or any other individual conception. I once repeated to him the reply of an unconsciously wise and pious woman of the Lexington congregation, when asked why they did not settle an eminent preacher (Dr. Hedge). " Oh, vre are a very simple people in East Lexington; we can hardlY understand anybody but Mr. Emerson." He did not laugh; on the contrary, with an accent almost pathetic, he replied, " If I had not been cut off untimely in the pulpit, perhaps I might have made something of the weekly sermon." No doubt he would have made much of it. But what he did was better; he turned the lecture desk into a pulpit, and for more than 30 years preached righteousness there. From 1835, the date of his second marriage, to Miss Lidian Jackson of Plymouth, lecturing was his chief occupation during half the year. His es says were fir§t lectures and were generally given to many audiences before he thought them good enough to print.
His first book, (Nature,) published in a small edition in 1835, was not a course of lec tures, but rather genuine essays, thought out for years, and mostly written out in their final form at the Old Manse, or finished in his own study at the home he made for himself in 1835 at the east end of Concord village, and where he died, 27 April 1882. The book attracted little notice in America or England at first, and a second edition was not issued until 1849, a dozen years having been required to sell 500 copies. But Carlyle, whom he had visited at Craigenputtock in 1833, and with whom he formed then a strict friendship and corresponded until Carlyle's death, saw its value, and so did Alcott, Hawthorne, Parker, Thoreau and a circle of high-minded women, who became his constant hearers. It now takes rank as the nearest approach to a system of philosophy which he put forth in successive chapters dur ing his whole active life. He planned another and more elaborate work, which he called The Natural History of Intellect,' and of which he wrote several chapters, intended to set forth the function and operation of the qualities of the human mind — memory, imagination, reason, volition, etc.— but he never brought it to such completion that it could be published as a whole, either by himself or his successive editors, Mr. Cabot, Dr. Emerson, etc. When invited to lecture on philosophy at Harvard, as he was in 1870, he threw these chapters and copious notes and readings into 18 lectures, two in a week, but the effort was too great for him at his age and in his failing strength, and he could never afterward bring the papers into form for printing. Several of the chap ters appear separately; and perhaps some future scholar may combine them with 'Nature' into a single work.
Emerson was actually introduced to noisy public notice by two of his early addresses, which are now printed in the same volume with 'Nature' —his Phi Beta Kappa oration of 1837 and his Divinity School Address of 1838. The first attracted attention and praise, mingled with surprise; the second, from its bold appeal to preachers to revise their theology and meet their hearers with original truths, not with traditional forms of religion, aroused the native intolerance of New England to shrill protest and uncharitable malediction. His own
college, of which he was the most illustrious graduate, drew back in timid aversion from thoughts alleged to be revolutionary, and it was not until 1867, 30 years after his first Phi Beta oration, that he was again invited to address the student-body, or to receive any collegiate honor. About the same time (1837-38) he identified himself with the unpopular cause of negro eman cipation, with the advanced ideas of Alcott in education, and with several schemes of social reform, which the commercialism of the period viewed with dislike or scornful indifference; and so he alienated another class in the New England and New York communities, who might otherwise have been charmed with his literary skill and his peculiar eloquence. Thus his audiences continued small and his writings had little general circulation, until the gradual education of people in his ideas and his phrase ology gave him the hearing that his genius deserved.
Meanwhile Emerson was drawing about him in Concord and Boston, in Plymouth, Salem and other New England towns a circle of friends and a school of thought. The num ber of these persons was small at first, but their enthusiasm was fervent, and their in tellectual and social force was considerable. Prominent among them was Margaret Fuller, a woman of genius who drew other women by her talent and her sympathies, and who had formed a circle of her own in Cambridge and Boston. Among men, the most prominent for a time was Bronson Alcott, an educational reformer, who had shown insight and eloquence in dealing with the young, but whose talent for conversa tion was not accompanied by any corresponding gift of expressing himself in writing. Others of the circle were F. H. Hedge, an accom plished student of German literature, afterward distinguished in theology; Dr. Conyers Francis, a learned pastor and professor at Cambridge; Theodore Parker, equally learned and more radical in opinion; with younger man like Wil liam Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Henry Thoreau, Wentworth Higginson, Ellery Channing, S. G. Ward, Marston Watson of Plymouth, J. Elliot Cabot; and in his own im mediate acquaintance, Mrs. Sarah Ripley, the most learned woman of New England, who had married Emerson's uncle, Rev. Samuel Rip ley; her brother, George Bradford; Miss Eliza beth Hoar, an accomplished woman, betrothed to Emerson's brother Charles (who had died in 1836), and Emerson's own aunt, Mary Emer son, who at times favored and at times opposed the movement in which her nephew was en gaged. This movement presently was called, rather than called itself, "Transcendental"— the term borrowed from the phraseology of Ger man philosophy, but hardly corresponding in New England to the meaning it had in Ger many, and indeed used loosely in America with no fixed meaning. Its followers were in fact idealists of various shades and divisions of thought and speculative philosophy, whose or gan, the quarterly review called The Dial, ex isting four years (1840-44), became the recep tacle of much youthful literature and many earnest essays toward the reformation of society in education, morals and politics. Its first editors were Margaret Fuller and Rev. George Ripley, the founder of the famous community at Brook Farm; but from the _fir_st Emerson had great influence in its councils, and ultimately became its proprietor and editor, associating Thoreau with himself in editing it. Hence much of the earlier writing of Thoreau first came out in The Dial, as did that of Emerson and Margaret Fuller and Theodore Parker. For this review Emerson wrote the introductory essay, as he did in December 1847 for a kindred venture, the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, in which Parker and Elliot were frequent writers. In these two brief essays, must we still look for a characterization of the so-called transcendental movement, so unimportant in its first appearance, yet so momentous 'afterward in determining some of the chief results of the Civil War of 1861-65. In The Dial Emerson spoke of it as °the progress of a revolution,' and such it proved indeed to be. He added: Those who share in it have no external organbation. Do badge. no creed, no name. They do not vote or Print. or even meet together. They do not know each other's faces or names. They are united only in a common love of truth and 'love of its work. . . . Without concert or proc lamation of any kind, they have silently given in their, serf,. al adhesion to a new hope; and in all companies do signify a greater trust in the nature and resources of, man than the laws or the popular opinions will well allow.