ould fain have kept one whose transparent purity of soul
had attached more than his heresy had alienated. But the innovation was
too great, and Emerson resigned his charge (1832). For some five or six
years longer he continued occasionally to preach, and more than one
congregation would have accepted him. But doubts on the subject of
public prayer began to weigh upon his mind. He suspected the practice by
which one man offered up prayer vicariously and collectively for the
assembled congregation. Was not that too, like the Communion Service, a
form that tended to deaden the spirit? Under the influence of this and
other scruples he finally ceased to preach (1838), and told his friends
that henceforth he must find his pulpit in the platform of the
lecturer. 'I see not,' he said, 'why this is not the most flexible of
all organs of opinion, from its popularity and from its newness,
permitting you to say what you think, without any shackles of
proscription. The pulpit in our age certainly gives forth an obstructed
and uncertain sound; and the faith of those in it, if men of genius, may
differ so much from that of those under it as to embarrass the
conscience of the speaker, because so much is attributed to him from the
fact of standing there.' The lecture was an important discovery, and it
has had many consequences in American culture. Among the more
undesirable of them has been (certainly not in Emerson's own case) the
importation of the pulpit accent into subjects where one would be
happier with out it.

Earlier in the same year in which he retired from his church at Boston,
Emerson had lost his young wife. Though we may well believe that he bore
these agitations with self-control, his health suffered, and in the
spring of 1833 he started for Europe. He came to be accused of saying
captious things about travelling. There are three wants, he said, that
can never be satisfied: that of the rich who want something more; that
of the sick who want something different; and that of the traveller who
says, Anywhere but here. Their restlessness, he told his countrymen,
argued want of character. They were infatuated with 'the rococo toy of
Italy.' As if what was true anywhere were not true everywhere; and as
if a man, go where he will, can find more beauty or worth than he
carries. All this was said, as we shall see that much else was said by
Emerson, by way of reaction and protest against instability of soul in
the people around him