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Background--Ralph Waldo Emerson's Life prior to Writing Nature

While serving as minister for a Unitarian church in Concord, N.H. Emerson fell in love with a beautiful, young eighteen year old girl, Ellen Louisa Tucker. They married in 1827, Sept. 30, despite the fact that she was very ill with tuberculosis and he was assailed by a variety of ills. All his friends and family were aware that Ellen, indeed, was dying. Many therapies were tried. All failed and Ellen died 18 months later: "My angel is gone to heaven this morning and I am alone in the world and strangely happy. Here lungs shall no more be torn nor her head scalded by her blood..." McAleer p. 107.

By this time Waldo Emerson had taken a permanent position as minister of the Second Church, Boston. In the late spring of 1832, beset by doctrinal doubts, he called together some of the deacons of the church. He could no longer serve the Lord's Supper because he viewed it as "a melancholy memorial." This came as a shock to his parishioners. As the meetings dragged on between the congregation and minister, Emerson had doubts even about the ministry. His church was distressed but insisted that Communion continue to be celebrated. Emerson resigned in a sermon in September, debilitated and wracked with fever. His step-grandfather and mentor, Ezra Ripley thought him mad.

His doctor prescribed a sea voyage. He set sail Christmas Day, 1832. The trip was typical of his day; warm Italy, cultural France and finally London to visit the literary greats. Coleridge, Carlyle and Wordsworth certainly influenced Emerson but what was really gripping him were the ideas that had been brewing in his mind. The idea that man had a moral sense that could triumph over intellect. That God was manifest as an inner light within us, an "over-soul," a "Supreme Spirit" that dwelt in every man and woman. All humans shared God's divinity, therefore Christian rites were not necessary. Hence, transcendentalism, or the power of the human soul was what drove all humanity.

Emerson was now ready to write, but he still needed a way to support himself. A new institution had sprung up, the Lyceum movement--The Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge which was the perfect and dignified way to earn a living. His first assignment was to speak on various aspects of science, to be "a naturalist." The Lyceum was to become an extended pulpit for Emerson. It seems strange to us today but Emerson continued to be asked to preach in various churches for years, well after he had resigned from the Second Church. However, he never considered the church as a vocation again--"Insist on yourself, never imitate," Emerson would boom from the podium. At the Manse in 1834 Emerson created the other half of his vocation, that of essayist: within a year and a half Emerson would publish Nature. "...Discovery of self was made not in the public sphere of his native Boston, but in the domestic sphere of Concord, to which he looked for respite and protection." (Cayton, 1989, p.160.)

Sources:

McAleer, John, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter, Little, Brown and Co., 1984