Within days of his return to Boston in October, Emerson was invited by the Natural History Society to lecture on “The Uses of Natural History”.
In this first lecture of early November 1833 at the city’s Masonic Temple, he drew on his Paris experience to argue that humans are “designed” to be natural historians.
Emerson pictured the benefits of studying nature as an upward spiral: good health and practicality circled up to the inherent pleasures of knowledge, then turned higher to the ability of nature “to explain man to himself”. He celebrated “that correspondence of the outward world to the inward world of thoughts and emotions, by which it is suited to represent what we think”.127 Emerson thus launched himself on a new career as a lecturer, gradually achieving fame in the United States and, later, abroad.
At the same time, although he had resigned his pastorate, Emerson never formally withdrew from the ministry, and was in demand once again as a supply pastor. For six years, until 1839, he preached frequently in Boston (including at Second Church), throughout Massachusetts, Maine, and even in New York City. From 1835 to 1838, he was virtually the regular minister for a rural parish in East Lexington. In fact, congregations in Waltham and New Bedford courted him with offers of full-time positions.
127 The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 3 vols., eds. Robert E. Spiller, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959–1972), 1: 6, 23, 24. Hereafter EL.
1.33 Masonic Temple, Boston, 1832.
In various guises, his major themes continued to be moral self-culture and the God within. Indeed, well into the 1840s, certain individuals and even some newspapers still addressed him as “the Rev. Mr. Emerson”. By 1839, however, his preaching days were over, his transition from the pulpit to the lectern having been natural and seamless.128
In May 1834, Emerson’s life was made at least somewhat easier when he received the first half of an inheritance from his wife’s estate: $11,600, the equivalent in 2013 dollars of about $326,000. But Charles wrote William that the annual interest from this sum, $1,200 (about $33,700 in 2013), was insufficient for three (his mother, Waldo, and himself), especially since
“Waldo does without a Profession”. (He had only begun to lecture the previous fall.) Even after 1837, when Emerson received the second half of Ellen’s inheritance, increasing his estate to about $653,000 in current dollars, he had to count on income from lecturing to fully provide for himself and his family.129
In 1834, however, Emerson was again beset by close personal loss. That summer, his close friend from Second Church, businessman George Adams Sampson, collapsed and died on his way to Bangor to join Emerson for a vacation. Emerson poured his grief into a memorial sermon for “our brother”
at Second Church.130 In attendance were Bronson Alcott and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who wrote that Emerson’s preaching was so moving that she felt she knew Sampson as if she had been “his acquaintance on earth”.131 Then word came that on October 1, Waldo’s brother Edward had died of consumption in Puerto Rico. His death, again a caution to Waldo about excessive work, combined with concern for his own health and a desire to leave fast-growing Boston for a place close to nature, led him a week later to move to the house in Concord, Massachusetts, that his grandfather, the Reverend William Emerson, had built in 1770. It was known as the “Old Manse”. Waldo had briefly stayed here as a child, as recounted earlier, and
128 The Boston Daily Times, January 30, 1846, for example, reported that “Rev. Ralph W.
Emerson and Charles Sumner, Esq”. were praised by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society for boycotting the New Bedford Lyceum when it refused to admit blacks (2).
For daily details of Emerson’s preaching and lecturing engagements, see Albert J. von Frank, An Emerson Chronology (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994).
129 Henry F. Pommer, Emerson’s First Marriage (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), 65. For monetary equivalencies, the latest figures available are for 2013;
see Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson, “Measures of Worth”; and The Calculators: Relative Values U.S. $ at http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/
130 CLXVIII, CS 4: 221–28.
131 L 1: 417n.42.
had fond memories of this family manse. After enduring yet another family tragedy, he was emerging again from a period of crippling mourning with a determined will to live.
1.34 Concord Center, 1839.
Grief itself seemed to unlock a deep vein of creativity within Emerson. A dabbler in verse since childhood, he was now seriously writing poetry.
While visiting Newton, Massachusetts, in early 1834, he composed an ode to the wild rhododendron, “The Rhodora”, epitomizing spring. Unlike Keats’s adulation of a man-made object to praise beauty in his classic “Ode to a Grecian Urn”, Emerson’s subject for the same purpose arises organically from nature, a rarely glimpsed wild shrub in Concord’s swamplands with startlingly vivid, reddish-purple flowers. Its creator, he sees, is the same as his own, linking the flower — and its hidden potential — with himself: “Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!/ I never thought to ask, I never knew;/ But, in my simple ignorance, suppose/ The self-same Power that brought me there brought you”.132 At his ancestral home, within a stone’s throw of the Old North Bridge, where the Revolution began, he made progress on his revolutionary “little book” on Nature.133 Along with
132 CW 9: 79.
133 See Merton M. Sealts Jr., and Alfred R. Ferguson, Emerson’s Nature: Origin, Growth, Meaning, 2nd ed., enlarged (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979).
this poetically philosophical manifesto, which would soon galvanize the attention of his own (rising) generation of restless idealists, came frequent walks in Concord’s woods. With its longstanding family and patriotic associations, the village became home almost overnight, and Emerson’s philosophical and daily delight with nature expressed itself in poetry. In the winter of 1834–1835, he composed “The Snow-Storm”, its impressionistic style making it one of his more enduring poems. It captures the tumult of a blizzard by using the metaphor of a Romantic Creator — “the fierce artificer” — and of art itself — “the mad wind’s night-work,/ The frolic architecture of the snow”.134
In late January 1835, Boston’s Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge engaged Emerson to present a six-part series on biography, starting with a now-lost introductory lecture on the subject. It must have been like its successors on Michelangelo, Luther, and Milton, treating the lives of men of exceptional qualities “who had the advantage of rare cultivation”.135 His next lecture, on George Fox, focused on the Quaker’s moral example as well as on his common humanity. Emerson’s final figure was Edmund Burke, the Irish-born, eighteenth-century British politician and writer, a secular master of statesmanship and eloquence. Studying great lives, Emerson believed, was a means of understanding history and of challenging oneself.
In his private life, Emerson seemed to be moving toward conventional stability. In January, after having preached in Plymouth, where he met Lydia Jackson, orphaned daughter of a prominent businessman and a leading Sunday school teacher, he wrote to her, proposing marriage.
Though she frankly admitted that she was no housekeeper, Lydia — a year older than Emerson — promptly accepted. Intelligent and devout, she was known among family and friends as a fervent champion of animals and of the underprivileged, especially blacks and women. She was also given to visions. Though sometime earlier she had heard Emerson preach, Lydia had hardly met him when she imagined the two of them descending her family’s staircase as husband and wife.136
134 CW 9: 90.
135 EL 1: 165.
136 McAleer, 201, and Richardson, 193.
1.35 Lidian Jackson Emerson at 56, 1858.
In early July 1835, for $3,500 (or on a national average, about $95,500 in 2013) Emerson purchased a large, handsome house on the Cambridge Turnpike. As far out of town as his grandfather’s manse on the opposite side of Concord, the “Coolidge Castle”, or “Bush”, as he came to call it, was enlarged to accommodate not only his prospective wife and mother but also Charles, who had been practicing law in Concord, and Charles’s betrothed, Elizabeth Hoar.137
Meanwhile, Emerson, proud of the role his ancestor the Reverend Peter Bulkeley had played in founding Concord in 1635, was glad to be asked to deliver an historical address on the occasion of its bicentennial.
On September 12, 1835, he gave a carefully researched lecture, which eventually became his first noteworthy publication, A Historical Discourse.138 His address celebrated “the ideal social compact”, one that had united the strong-willed Puritans and endured during the Revolution, when, Emerson noted, a “deep religious sentiment sanctified the thirst for liberty”.139
137 Richardson, 207–08, and McAleer, 207–08.
138 A Historical Discourse, Delivered Before the Citizens of Concord, 12th September, 1835, On the Second Centennial Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Town (Concord: G. F. Bemis, 1835). See CW 10: 17–54.
139 CW 10: 27, 43.
1.36 Emerson’s house, “Bush”, Concord, 1875, surrounded by pine trees he planted in 1836.
Two days after this address, Waldo and Lydia Jackson were married in Plymouth. She would have preferred to set up housekeeping in her family’s historic seaside town, but he persuaded her of the virtues and charms of Concord. Emerson also asked her to add an “n” to “Lydia”, making it
“Lidian”, possibly hoping to avoid the common New England pronunciation
“Lydier Emerson”, that typically inserted an “r” between two words that ended and began with vowels.140 Lidian immediately devoted herself to a life of caring for her husband, increasing social concerns — particularly, at this moment, abolition — and a demanding household. In fact, on the first night the Emersons moved in, Waldo, exuberant over his purchase, invited a couple from Plymouth to spend the night. Lidian, initially aghast,
140 Richardson, 192, 611.
nevertheless dutifully managed.141 Emerson’s home for the rest of his long productive life, “Bush” would remain a constant center of high hospitality with constant comings and goings of family and a growing number of old and new friends.
In early November 1835, again in Boston, Emerson started a new ten-part lecture series on English literature. Great writers, he stated, express
“the truths and sentiments in common circulation among us”, and we approach them not as mere talented entertainers but as geniuses who were
“obedient to the spirit that was in them”.142 With new confidence, Emerson was also offering a hopeful vision for himself: as someone who, like these classic figures, might express ideas about humanity’s most central topics to a wide audience. Such a sentiment would raise expectations among his family, friends, and audiences — many still thought of him as a pastor — to use his lectures for reform matters. These anticipations would only increase as his reputation steadily grew alongside mounting unrest over slavery and women’s rights. At thirty-two, he had minimized recurring self-doubt, boldly left his pastorate for lecturing, and was well on his way toward addressing the world as a compelling spokesman for a “new philosophy”. Inspired by being resident on Concord’s ancestral rebellious ground, Emerson would finish his testament to this fresh thinking — the manuscript that he would entitle Nature — in the coming months. Its basic ideas and their elaboration in landmark speeches that followed soon after would stir up the most sacrosanct traditions of Boston and eventually all of America. The next chapter explores the effect of these intellectual fireworks
both on Emerson and on his increasingly turbulent country.
141 Ellen Tucker Emerson, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, ed. Delores B. Carpenter (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1992), 62.
142 EL 1: 230, 231.