He then announces that, as it is the prevailing opinion and feeling in our religious community that it is a part of a pastor's duties to administer this rite, he is about to resign the office which had been confided to him.
This is the only sermon of Mr. Emerson's ever published. It was impossible to hear or to read it without honoring the preacher for his truthfulness, and recognizing the force of his statement and reasoning. It was equally impossible that he could continue his ministrations over a congregation which held to the ordinance he wished to give up entirely. And thus it was, that with the most friendly feelings on both sides, Mr. Emerson left the pulpit of the Second Church and found himself obliged to make a beginning in a new career.
Section 1. Visit to Europe.--On his Return preaches in Different Places.--Emerson in the Pulpit.--At Newton.--Fixes his Residence at Concord.--The Old Manse.--Lectures in Boston.--Lectures on Michael Angelo and on Milton published in the "North American Review."--Beginning of the Correspondence with Carlyle.--Letters to the Rev. James Freeman Clarke.--Republication of "Sartor Resartus."
Section 2. Emerson's Second Marriage.--His New Residence in Concord.--Historical Address.--Course of Ten Lectures on English Literature delivered in Boston.--The Concord Battle Hymn.--Preaching in Concord and East Lexington.--Accounts of his Preaching by Several Hearers.--A Course of Lectures on the Nature and Ends of History.--Address on War.--Death of Edward Bliss Emerson.--Death of Charles Chauncy Emerson.
Section 3. Publication of "Nature."--Outline of this Essay.--Its Reception.--Address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
Section 1. In the year 1833 Mr. Emerson visited Europe for the first time. A great change had come over his life, and he needed the relief which a corresponding change of outward circumstances might afford him. A brief account of this visit is prefixed to the volume entitled "English Traits." He took a short tour, in which he visited Sicily, Italy, and France, and, crossing from Boulogne, landed at the Tower Stairs in London. He finds nothing in his Diary to publish concerning visits to places. But he saw a number of distinguished persons, of whom he gives pleasant accounts, so singularly different in tone from the rough caricatures in which Carlyle vented his spleen and caprice, that one marvels how the two men could have talked ten minutes together, or would wonder, had not one been as imperturbable as the other was explosive. Horatio Greenough and Walter Savage Landor are the chief persons he speaks of as having met upon the Continent. Of these he reports various opinions as delivered in conversation. He mentions incidentally that he visited Professor Amici, who showed him his microscopes "magnifying (it was said) two thousand diameters." Emerson hardly knew his privilege; he may have been the first American to look through an immersion lens with the famous Modena professor. Mr. Emerson says that his narrow and desultory reading had inspired him with the wish to see the faces of three or four writers, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, De Quincey, Carlyle. His accounts of his interviews with these distinguished persons are too condensed to admit of further abbreviation. Goethe and Scott, whom he would have liked to look upon, were dead; Wellington he saw at Westminster Abbey, at the funeral of Wilberforce. His impressions of each of the distinguished persons whom he visited should be looked at in the light of the general remark which, follows:--