Florence. On his return he retired to his birthplace, the village of
Concord, Massachusetts, and settled down among his books and his
fields, becoming a sort of "glorified farmer," but issuing frequently
from his retirement to instruct and delight audiences of thoughtful
people at Boston and at other points all through the country. Emerson
was the perfection of a lyceum lecturer. His manner was quiet but
forcible, his voice of charming quality, and his enunciation clean-cut
and refined. The sentence was his unit in composition. His lectures
seemed to begin anywhere and to end anywhere and to resemble strings of
exquisitely polished sayings rather than continuous discourses. His
printed essays, with unimportant exceptions, were first written and
delivered as lectures. In 1836 he published his first book, _Nature_,
which remains the most systematic statement of his philosophy. It
opened a fresh spring-head in American thought, and the words of its
introduction announced that its author had broken with the past. "Why
should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why
should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of
tradition, and a religion by revelation to us and not the history of
theirs?"

It took eleven years to sell five hundred copies of this little book.
But the year following its publication the remarkable Phi Beta Kappa
address at Cambridge, on the _American Scholar_, electrified the little
public of the university. This is described by Lowell as "an event
without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be
always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its
inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows
clustering with eager heads, what grim silence of foregone dissent!" To
Concord come many kindred spirits, drawn by Emerson's magnetic
attraction. Thither came, from Connecticut, Amos Bronson Alcott, born