Over the next year and a half Emerson settled into Boston society. He was made an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa, appointed chaplain of the Massachusetts senate, and elected to serve on the school board. All signs pointed to his becoming a respectable member of Boston’s Brahmin elite, and the obligations of family probably would have assured that. After a severe attack of bleeding at the lungs, Ellen’s condition steadily worsened, and on February 8, 1831, she died. Emerson tried to find solace in his conviction that her spiritual presence in his life would persist, but his bereavement was profound. He wrote to his Aunt Mary in the hours after Ellen’s death, “I have never known a person in the world in whose separate existence as a soul I could so readily & fully believe.” A few lines later, however, he admitted that “things & duties will look coarse & vulgar enough to me when I find the romance of her presence withdrawn from them all” (Letters, vol. 1, p. 318). Emerson knew himself well. Over the next six months, the daily obligations of ministering to the congregation of the Second Church began to wear on him, and by October 1831 he was exasperated with the forms and rituals of organized religion. “How little love is at the bottom of these great religious shows,” he wrote in his journal; “congregations and temples and sermons,—how much sham!” (Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, vol. 3, p. 301). In early June 1832, Emerson wrote a letter to his congregation proposing to change the ritual for administering communion. Apparently Emerson believed that, in the minds of his parishioners, the formal ritual of “the Lord’s Supper” was more important than following Christ’s example in their daily lives. When the church committee rejected his proposal, Emerson preached a final sermon defending his position, and then tendered his resignation.

For Emerson, leaving the church was not a repudiation of his faith but a reaffirmation of it. He was increasingly convinced of the immediacy of God in human experience. There was no need for the intermediate forms of the liturgy once one realized, as Emerson had, that “my own mind is the direct revelation I have from God” (Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, vol. 3, p. 312). Having severed his ties with the Church, he had to find a new way to communicate his revelation to the world. Inspired by a number of articles published anonymously in the British periodicals Frazer’s Magazine and the New Monthly Magazine, Emerson considered starting a magazine of his own. He soon discovered that the anonymous author was Thomas Carlyle. However, his newfound literary ambitions were dampened by illness. The emotional and mental strain of leaving the ministry had taken its toll, and Emerson continued to mourn Ellen’s death. He planned to sail for Puerto Rico for the winter, to join his brother Edward, who was convalescing there, but he suddenly changed his mind on hearing that a ship was preparing to sail for Naples, Italy. Emerson seized the opportunity to see the “Old Europe” his brother William had described in his letters from Germany. Perhaps he would also find an opportunity to meet some of the prominent scientists, artists, and men of letters whose work he had been reading with such enthusiasm—perhaps this Carlyle, “who gives us confidence in our philosophy” and “assures the truth-lover everywhere of sympathy” (Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, vol. 4, p. 45).

Emerson spent five months in Italy touring architectural sites and museums, absorbing visual images of ancient Greek and Roman culture and the art of the Italian Renaissance, often in the company of the English poet Walter Savage Landor.