Without a church or a pulpit, he soon had a congregation.  It was largely made up of young persons of both sexes, young by nature, if not in years, who, tired of routine and formulae, and full of vague aspirations, found in his utterances the oracles they sought.  To them, in the words of his friend and neighbor Mr. Alcott, he

  “Sang his full song of hope and lofty cheer.”

Nor was it only for a few seasons that he drew his audiences of devout listeners around him.  Another poet, his Concord neighbor, Mr. Sanborn, who listened to him many years after the first flush of novelty was over, felt the same enchantment, and recognized the same inspiring life in his words, which had thrilled the souls of those earlier listeners.

  “His was the task and his the lordly gift
  Our eyes, our hearts, bent earthward, to uplift.”

This was his power,—­to inspire others, to make life purer, loftier, calmer, brighter.  Optimism is what the young want, and he could no more help taking the hopeful view of the universe and its future than Claude could help flooding his landscapes with sunshine.

“Nature,” published in 1836, “the first clear manifestation of his genius,” as Mr. Norton calls it, revealed him as an idealist and a poet, with a tendency to mysticism.  If he had been independent in circumstances, he would doubtless have developed more freely in these directions.  But he had his living to get and a family to support, and he must look about him for some paying occupation.  The lecture-room naturally presented itself to a scholar accustomed to speaking from the pulpit.  This medium of communicating thought was not as yet very popular, and the rewards it offered were but moderate.  Emerson was of a very hopeful nature, however, and believed in its possibilities.

—­“I am always haunted with brave dreams of what might be accomplished in the lecture-room,—­so free and so unpretending a platform,—­a Delos not yet made fast.  I imagine an eloquence of infinite variety, rich as conversation can be, with anecdote, joke, tragedy, epics and pindarics, argument and confession.”  So writes Emerson to Carlyle in 1841.

It would be as unfair to overlook the special form in which Emerson gave most of his thoughts to the world, as it would be to leave out of view the calling of Shakespeare in judging his literary character.  Emerson was an essayist and a lecturer, as Shakespeare was a dramatist and a play-actor.

The exigencies of the theatre account for much that is, as it were, accidental in the writings of Shakespeare.  The demands of the lecture-room account for many peculiarities which are characteristic of Emerson as an author.  The play must be in five acts, each of a given length.  The lecture must fill an hour and not overrun it.  Both play and lecture must be vivid, varied, picturesque, stimulating, or the audience would tire before the allotted time was over.