on. He found
it impossible to continue preaching, and, with the most friendly
feelings on both sides, he parted from his congregation.

A few months later (1833) he went to Europe for a short year of
travel. While abroad, he visited Walter Savage Landor, Coleridge and
Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle. This visit to Carlyle was to both men
a most interesting experience. They parted feeling that they had much
intellectually in common. This belief fostered a sympathy which, by
the time they had discovered how different they really were, had grown
so strong a habit that they always kept up their intimacy. This year
of travel opened Emerson's eyes to many things of which he had
previously been ignorant; he had profited by detachment from the
concerns of a limited community and an isolated church.

After his return he began to find his true field of activity in the
lecture-hall, and delivered a number of addresses in Boston and its
vicinity. While thus coming before the open public on the lecture
platform, he was all the time preparing the treatise which was to
embody all the quintessential elements of his philosophical doctrine.
This was the essay _Nature_, which was published in 1836. By its
conception of external Nature as an incarnation of the Divine Mind it
struck the fundamental principle of Emerson's religious belief. The
essay had a very small circulation at first, though later it became
widely known.

In the winter of 1836 Emerson followed up his discourse on Nature by a
course of twelve lectures on the "Philosophy of History," a
considerable portion of which eventually became embodied in his
essays. The next year (1837) was the year of the delivery of the _Man
Thinking, or the American Scholar_ address before the Phi Beta Kappa
Society at Cambridge.

This society, composed of the first twenty-five men in each class
graduating from college, has annual meetings which have called forth
the best efforts of many distinguished scholars and thinkers.
Emerson's address was listened to with the most profound interest. It
declared a sort of intellectual independence for America. Henceforth
we were to be emancipated from clogging foreign influences, and a
national literature was to expand under the fostering care of the
Republic.

These two discourses, _Nature_ and _The American Scholar_, strike the
keynote of Emerson's philosophical, poetical, and moral teachings. In
fact he had, as every great teacher has, only a limite