ilor's Bethel near Long Wharf, considered
him "one of the sweetest souls God ever made," but as ignorant of the
principles of the New Testament as Balaam's ass was of Hebrew grammar.
By and by came an open difference with his congregation over the
question of administering the Communion. "I am not interested in it,"
Emerson admitted, and he wrote in his "Journal" the noble words: "It is
my desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which
I cannot do with my whole heart." His resignation was accepted in 1832.
His young wife had died of consumption in the same year. He now sailed
for Italy, France, and England, a memorable journey which gave him an
acquaintance with Landor, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle, but which
was even more significant in sending him, as he says, back to himself,
to the resources of his own nature. "When shows break up," wrote Whitman
afterward, "what but oneself is sure?" In 1834 and 1835 we find Emerson
occupying a room in the Old Manse at Concord, strolling in the quiet
fields, lecturing or preaching if he were invited to do so, but chiefly
absorbed in a little book which he was beginning to write--a new
utterance of a new man.

This book, the now famous "Nature" of 1836, contains the essence of
Emerson's message to his generation. It is a prose essay, but written in
the ecstatic mood of a poet. The theme of its meditation is the soul
as related to Nature and to God. The soul is primal; Nature, in all
its bountiful and beautiful commodities, exists for the training of the
soul; it is the soul's shadow. And every soul has immediate access to
Deity. Thus the utility and beauty and discipline of Nature lift the
soul Godward. The typical sentence of the book is this: "The sun shines
today also"; that is to say: the world is still alive and fair; let us
lift up our hearts! Only a few Americans of 1836 bought this singular
volume, but Emerson went serenely forward. He had found his path.

In 1837 he delivered the well-known Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard
on "The American Scholar." Emerson was now thirty-four; he had married
a second time, had bought a house of his own in Concord, and purposed to
make a living by lecturing and writing. His address in Cambridge, though
it contained no reference to himself, was after all a justification
of the way of life he had chosen: a declaration of intellectual
independence for himself and his countrymen, an exhortation of
self-trust to the i