Emerson’s point of view, though familiar to students of philosophy, is strange to the popular understanding, and hence has arisen the complaint of his obscurity.  Moreover, he apprehended and expressed these ideas as a poet, in figurative and emotional language, and not as a metaphysician, in a formulated statement.  His own position in relation to systematic philosophers is described in what he says of Plato, in his series of sketches entitled Representative Men, 1850:  “He has not a system.  The dearest disciples and defenders are at fault.  He attempted a theory of the universe, and his theory is not complete or self-evident.  One man thinks he means this, and another that; he has said one thing in one place, and the reverse of it in another place.”  It happens, therefore, that, to many students of more formal philosophies, Emerson’s meaning seems elusive, and he appears to write from temporary moods and to contradict himself.  Had he attempted a reasoned exposition of the transcendental philosophy, instead of writing essays and poems, he might have added one more to the number of system-mongers; but he would not have taken that significant place which he occupies in the general literature of the time, nor exerted that wide influence upon younger writers which has been one of the stimulating forces in American thought.  It was because Emerson was a poet that he is our Emerson.  And yet it would be impossible to disentangle his peculiar philosophical ideas from the body of his writings and to leave the latter to stand upon their merits as literature merely.  He is the poet of certain high abstractions, and his religion is central to all his work—­excepting, perhaps, his English Traits, 1856, an acute study of national characteristics; and a few of his essays and verses, which are independent of any particular philosophical stand-point.

When Emerson resigned his parish in 1832, he made a short trip to Europe, where he visited Carlyle at Craigenputtock, and Landor at Florence.  On his return he retired to his birthplace, the village of Concord, Massachusetts, and settled down among his books and his fields, becoming a sort of “glorified farmer,” but issuing frequently from his retirement to instruct and delight audiences of thoughtful people at Boston and at other points all through the country.  Emerson was the perfection of a lyceum lecturer.  His manner was quiet but forcible, his voice of charming quality, and his enunciation clean-cut and refined.  The sentence was his unit in composition.  His lectures seemed to begin anywhere and to end anywhere and to resemble strings of exquisitely polished sayings rather than continuous discourses.  His printed essays, with unimportant exceptions, were first written and delivered as lectures.  In 1836 he published his first book, Nature, which remains the most systematic statement of his philosophy.  It opened a fresh spring-head in American thought, and the words of its introduction announced that its author had broken with the past.  “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?  Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us and not the history of theirs?”