After drifting for some years after college, Emerson settled on the ministry as a career. He also fell in love with, and married, Ellen Tucker, a young and beautiful New Hampshire woman who wanted to become a poet. A year and a half after the wedding Ellen died of advanced tuberculosis. Emerson was shattered. He had ceased to believe in the sacrament of communion and had left his church over the issue. He was not yet thirty; his beloved wife was dead; his career was over. He moved his mother, auctioned his furniture, sold his house, and fled abroad. Returning home nine months later, he completely reorganized his life, abandoning Boston and theology, moving to Concord, Massachusetts, and doing free-lance lecturing on science, literature, and modern times. He married Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, bought a home, and raised a family of two boys and two girls. His second life, like his first, was death-marked. His brilliant younger brothers Edward and Charles died in 1834 and 1836, and his first son, Waldo, died at five in 1842.

Emerson was himself bookish, even as a child. Adults adored him. He wrote heroic poems at ten. Friends remembered his slaving over a copybook with his tongue hanging out. As a young man, he sneered at the heartlessness of the age with Byron’s sneer; “They grieved for those who perished in the cutter, / And likewise for the biscuit casks and butter.” As an adult, Emerson seemed reserved, at least to outsiders, but it was a strongly emotional nature that he held in reserve. His eyes flashed fire unforgettably when he lectured. He had a large circle of warmly admiring friends, mostly women, and he habitually sat forward on his chair, with his legs all braided up beneath him. He was tall and gangly, with marked family features, strong eyes and a large Roman nose. Acquaintances were always saying to him, “Seems to me you are a bit thinner than when I saw you last.” He was formal on formal occasions, and he was capable of repose. He took long daily walks. He liked to arrange his tools and nails in the barn workshop. One day Longfellow found Emerson waiting for him on the Boston-to-Portland steamer, “sitting inside a coil of rope, with his hat pulled over his eyes.”

He became a close friend of Henry Thoreau, of Margaret Fuller, of Thomas Carlyle. He had a profound effect on Walt Whitman. He was the central figure of the so-called Transcendental Club, which included Frederic Hedge, George Ripley (founder of Brook Farm), James Freeman Clarke, Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, and Elizabeth Peabody. Books of his essays appeared in 1841 and 1844. As his fame grew, he traveled farther and longer on the annual lecture circuit by which he made his living. In a typical year he gave seventy-five lectures all over the country during a continuous five-month period in which he either traveled or lectured almost every day. He was his own booking agent, advertiser, and arranger. He helped edit The Dial—the brave, short-lived periodical of the new Transcendental ideas. He traveled to England again in 1847, to California in 1871, and to Egypt in 1872. As an old man, his memory faded before his wit. Searching for the word “umbrella,” when it refused to come, he finally said, “you know, the thing guests leave behind.” By the time he died in 1882, he had become his own lengthened shadow, and was already an American institution.