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Ralph Waldo Emerson: Main Page | an Impressive Emerson Poetry Sampler | Thought Provoking Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson | Emerson, the Sage of Concord | Thoughts on Moral Individualism -- Emerson | Early Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson | Mr. Emerson Wanted Own Revelation of God | Emerson as a Polished Literary Stylist | Ralph Waldo Emerson : Books and Reviews | Emerson Reclaimed an Idealistic Philosophy | Katharena's Essential Emerson, for Poets and Dreamers!

When Ralph Waldo Emerson left the church, he was in search of a more certain conviction of God than that granted by the historical evidences of miracles. He wanted his own revelation--i.e., a direct and immediate experience of God. When he left his pulpit he journeyed to Europe. In Paris he saw Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu's collection of natural specimens arranged in a developmental order that confirmed his belief in man's spiritual relation to nature. In England he paid memorable visits to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle. At home once more in 1833, he began to write Nature and established himself as a popular and influential lecturer. By 1834 he had found a permanent dwelling place in Concord, Mass., and in the following year he married Lydia Jackson and settled into the kind of quiet domestic life that was essential to his work.

The 1830s saw Emerson become an independent literary man. During this decade his own personal doubts and difficulties were increasingly shared by other intellectuals. Before the decade was over his personal manifestos--Nature, "The American Scholar," and the divinity school Address--had rallied together a group that came to be called the Transcendentalists, of which he was popularly acknowledged the spokesman. Emerson helped initiate Transcendentalism by publishing anonymously in Boston in 1836 a little book of 95 pages entitled Nature. Having found the answers to his spiritual doubts, he formulated his essential philosophy, and almost everything he ever wrote afterward was an extension, amplification, or amendment of the ideas he first affirmed in Nature.