Spirit alters, moulds, makes it’” (p. 49). Just three generations after the Declaration of Independence, America was searching for its cultural identity. In Nature, Emerson provided a philosophical foundation for the production of a new set of cultural values and beliefs. The interaction between the natural world and human consciousness provided unlimited possibilities for the production of the values and beliefs that comprise a genuinely democratic culture, in which each individual must “build [his] own world” (p. 49) from experiences that are common to all.

As Nature slowly took shape, Emerson was actively re-engaging with life and New England society. He agreed to preach on an interim basis at several congregations but he made it clear that he had no intention of returning to the ministry full-time. Instead he sought out opportunities to lecture on topics of his own choosing, including “On the Relation of Man to the Globe,” “Literary Ethics,” and a series of biographical sketches modeled after Plutarch’s Lives. An inheritance from Ellen Tucker’s estate freed him from the necessity of having to seek full-time employment and made it possible for him to pour his energies into his new intellectual pursuits. He struck up a correspondence with Carlyle and was soon encouraging him to come and lecture in America. He continued to make plans for a new magazine, to be called the Transcendentalist. He continued to write poetry, producing, among others, “The Rhodora,” “Each and All,” and “The Snowstorm,” which capture in poetic form the philosophy he expressed in prose in Nature. During this time, Emerson also met Lydia Jackson, the woman who would become his second wife. Without pretending to recapture the youthful romance he shared with Ellen, Emerson courted Lydian (as he came to call her) with an intensity born of their mutual admiration and respect. Their marriage coincided with Emerson’s return to his ancestral home in Concord, where his grandfather William Emerson had served as minister of the First Church prior to his death in the Revolutionary War, and where his step-grandfather, Ezra Ripley, continued to occupy the pulpit in his place. Ripley was nearing retirement, and there may have been some speculation that Emerson would succeed him, in turn. Clearly an effort was made to welcome him into the community. He was invited to be the principal speaker at the town’s celebration of its two-hundredth anniversary, and the speech he delivered on the history of Concord became his first published address. He purchased a house for himself and his new bride, and arranged to have his mother move in with them, while finding rooms in town for his Aunt Mary and his brother Charles. Even as he settled with his family into the familiar confines of Concord society however, his intellectual and literary ambitions were growing to national proportions.

Emerson was thirty-two when he and Lydian were married, and having re-established a private life for himself with his family, he was ready to embark on a public career with renewed vigor and spirit. His stint as a public lecturer had exposed him to a new audience of intellectuals, artists, and entrepreneurs, and soon after the publication of Nature in 1836, he organized a symposium of people interested in discussing the leading intellectual trends in American culture. This group, which came to be known as the Transcendental Club, included George Ripley, the founder of the Brook Farm commune; Orestes Brownson, soon to be editor of the Boston Quarterly Review; Bronson Alcott, the educational reformer whose Temple school anticipated many of the modern methods of education; Frederic Henry Hedge, a brilliant young professor of German philosophy; Theodore Parker, who became a prominent leader of the abolitionist movement in Boston; and James Freeman Clarke, who as editor of the Western Messenger would bring Emerson’s transcendental philosophy to the Ohio River Valley. Emerson would later invite his young friend Henry David Thoreau to attend, and when the club met at Emerson’s house he arranged for Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Hoar, and Sarah Ripley to be present, and in subsequent meetings women often participated in the conversation and debate. Fuller became a frequent visitor to his home, and with her he would plan and edit the Dial, the literary journal that served as a publishing venue for many writers associated with the transcendental movement.

The meetings of the Transcendental Club inspired Emerson to make bold pronouncements of the idealist philosophy he had outlined in Nature on two prominent occasions. The first was his invitation to address Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa society on August 31,1837, the morning after commencement. Although his chosen topic, “The American Scholar,” was a traditional one, Emerson poured into it his fierce conviction that each individual possesses unique talents and ability, and that education should cultivate those talents rather than transmit the intellectual traditions of the past. “Why should we not have a literature of our own?” he had asked in Nature. Now he made the same rhetorical appeal to Harvard’s leading graduates. “Meek young men grow up in libraries,” he chided them, “believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books” (p. 54). In the strongest terms he could imagine, Emerson reminded these students that education was of value only insofar as it drew out their own intellectual force. Colleges “can only highly serve us,” he said, “when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius... and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame” (p. 56).