In the autumn of 1834 he moved to Concord, living with his kinsman, Dr. Ripley, at the Manse, but soon bought house and land on the Boston Road, on the edge of the village towards Walden woods.  Thither, in the autumn, he brought his wife.  Miss Lidian Jackson, of Plymouth, and this was their home during the rest of their lives.

The new life to which he had been called opened pleasantly and increased in happiness and opportunity, except for the sadness of bereavements, for, in the first few years, his brilliant brothers Edward and Charles died, and soon afterward Waldo, his firstborn son, and later his mother.  Emerson had left traditional religion, the city, the Old World, behind, and now went to Nature as his teacher, his inspiration.  His first book, “Nature,” which he was meditating while in Europe, was finished here, and published in 1836.  His practice during all his life in Concord was to go alone to the woods almost daily, sometimes to wait there for hours, and, when thus attuned, to receive the message to which he was to give voice.  Though it might be colored by him in transmission, he held that the light was universal.

    “Ever the words of the Gods resound,
      But the porches of man’s ear
    Seldom in this low life’s round
      Are unsealed that he may hear.”

But he resorted, also, to the books of those who had handed down the oracles truly, and was quick to find the message destined for him.  Men, too, he studied eagerly, the humblest and the highest, regretting always that the brand of the scholar on him often silenced the men of shop and office where he came.  He was everywhere a learner, expecting light from the youngest and least educated visitor.  The thoughts combined with the flower of his reading were gradually grouped into lectures, and his main occupation through life was reading these to who would hear, at first in courses in Boston, but later all over the country, for the Lyceum sprang up in New England in these years in every town, and spread westward to the new settlements even beyond the Mississippi.  His winters were spent in these rough, but to him interesting journeys, for he loved to watch the growth of the Republic in which he had faith, and his summers were spent in study and writing.  These lectures were later severely pruned and revised, and the best of them gathered into seven volumes of essays under different names between 1841 and 1876.  The courses in Boston, which at first were given in the Masonic Temple, were always well attended by earnest and thoughtful people.  The young, whether in years or in spirit, were always and to the end his audience of the spoken or written word.  The freedom of the Lyceum platform pleased Emerson.  He found that people would hear on Wednesday with approval and unsuspectingly doctrines from which on Sunday they felt officially obliged to dissent.

Mr. Lowell, in his essays, has spoken of these early lectures and what they were worth to him and others suffering from the generous discontent of youth with things as they were.  Emerson used to say, “My strength and my doom is to be solitary;” but to a retired scholar a wholesome offset to this was the travelling and lecturing in cities and in raw frontier towns, bringing him into touch with the people, and this he knew and valued.