Emerson quit the pulpit, saying a good minister might need to leave the ministry
Grieving his young wife and doubting church ritual, Ralph Waldo Emerson resigned as a Boston pastor in 1832. A visit to a Paris botanical garden then turned him toward nature and science. Some 1,500 lectures later he had led the transcendentalist movement, mentored Thoreau and earned Nietzsche's verdict as the most gifted American.
Emerson was born in Boston on 25 May 1803, son of a Unitarian minister who died of stomach cancer just before the boy's eighth birthday. His mother and aunts raised him, above all his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, who wrote to him for decades. He entered Harvard at 14, working as the president's messenger and as a waiter, began journals he called Wide World, and graduated in the exact middle of a class of 59. By his final year he went by Waldo.
He taught at a school for young women run by his brother William, then studied divinity. Ill health sent him south in 1826 to St Augustine, Florida, where he befriended Achille Murat, a nephew of Napoleon, and heard a slave auction outside a Bible Society meeting. Ordained at Boston's Second Church in 1829, he married Ellen Tucker, already ill with tuberculosis; she died in February 1831 aged 20. Doubts about Communion and public prayer led him to resign the next year.
Sailing for Europe on Christmas Day 1832, he met John Stuart Mill in Rome and Wordsworth, Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle in England; he later acted as Carlyle's unofficial agent in America. In Paris, the Jardin des Plantes and its orderly classification of plants gave him an almost visionary sense that everything is connected. He began lecturing in November 1833, settled in Concord, and married Lydia Jackson in 1835. His brothers Edward and Charles died of tuberculosis in 1834 and 1836.
Nature, published in 1836, set out transcendentalism, treating the universe as made of Nature and the Soul. The 1837 address The American Scholar was hailed by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. as the nation's intellectual declaration of independence. Essays of the early 1840s, notably Self-Reliance, championed individual thought against conformity. Walt Whitman called him master. He died on 27 April 1882.
Source: Ralph Waldo Emerson
