Emerson did not long remain a minister.  In 1832 he preached a sermon in which he announced certain views in regard to the communion service which were disapproved by a large part of his congregation.  He found it impossible to continue preaching, and, with the most friendly feelings on both sides, he parted from his congregation.

A few months later (1833) he went to Europe for a short year of travel.  While abroad, he visited Walter Savage Landor, Coleridge and Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle.  This visit to Carlyle was to both men a most interesting experience.  They parted feeling that they had much intellectually in common.  This belief fostered a sympathy which, by the time they had discovered how different they really were, had grown so strong a habit that they always kept up their intimacy.  This year of travel opened Emerson’s eyes to many things of which he had previously been ignorant; he had profited by detachment from the concerns of a limited community and an isolated church.

After his return he began to find his true field of activity in the lecture-hall, and delivered a number of addresses in Boston and its vicinity.  While thus coming before the open public on the lecture platform, he was all the time preparing the treatise which was to embody all the quintessential elements of his philosophical doctrine.  This was the essay Nature, which was published in 1836.  By its conception of external Nature as an incarnation of the Divine Mind it struck the fundamental principle of Emerson’s religious belief.  The essay had a very small circulation at first, though later it became widely known.

In the winter of 1836 Emerson followed up his discourse on Nature by a course of twelve lectures on the “Philosophy of History,” a considerable portion of which eventually became embodied in his essays.  The next year (1837) was the year of the delivery of the Man Thinking, or the American Scholar address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge.

This society, composed of the first twenty-five men in each class graduating from college, has annual meetings which have called forth the best efforts of many distinguished scholars and thinkers.  Emerson’s address was listened to with the most profound interest.  It declared a sort of intellectual independence for America.  Henceforth we were to be emancipated from clogging foreign influences, and a national literature was to expand under the fostering care of the Republic.

These two discourses, Nature and The American Scholar, strike the keynote of Emerson’s philosophical, poetical, and moral teachings.  In fact he had, as every great teacher has, only a limited number of principles and theories to teach.  These principles of life can all be enumerated in twenty words—­self-reliance, culture, intellectual and moral independence, the divinity of nature and man, the necessity of labor, and high ideals.