Ralph Waldo Emerson
...e Second Church in Boston. Shortly afterwards, he married Ellen Tucker in 1829. He resigned after her death in 1832, because of tuberculosis, troubled by “theological doctrines” such as the Lord’s Supper, and various travels around Europe. In 1835, he married Lydia Jackson; they lived in Concord and had four children while he settled into his life of conversations, reading, writing, and lectures. Waldo had a very busy house, because of friends like Margaret Fuller and Henry Thoreau who would stay months at a time to help out and talk in his lectures. In 1840, he published a magazine The Dial, with Margaret Fuller editing. His Essays were published in The Dial in 1841. The magazine came to a close in 1844. Soon after the death of his good friend, Henry Thoreau, from lockjaw his writing had a new “stain” or darker feeling to it beginning initially with his poem “Threnody.” However, that was not enough to hold him back from publishing a new volume of essays in 1844. He started to plan a new series of lectures on great men and publication of his poems in 1846. All this was during the time that he was speaking out against the annexation of Texas and reading about Persian and Indic wisdom. In 1845 he began to lecture on “the uses of great men,” a series that added to the 1850 publication of Representative Men; by 1850 he was giving around 80 lectures a year. Through a series of 40 years, he gave about 1500 public lectures, traveling as far as California and Canada but generally he stayed in Massachusetts. In 1855 he gave lectures on “Natural History of Intellect” and in 1856, his book English Traits was published, based on the same ideas. In 1851, he did a...