written in the ecstatic mood of a poet. The theme of its
meditation is the soul as related to Nature and to God. The soul
is primal; Nature, in all its bountiful and beautiful
commodities, exists for the training of the soul; it is the
soul's shadow. And every soul has immediate access to Deity. Thus
the utility and beauty and discipline of Nature lift the soul
Godward. The typical sentence of the book is this: "The sun
shines today also"; that is to say: the world is still alive and
fair; let us lift up our hearts! Only a few Americans of 1836
bought this singular volume, but Emerson went serenely forward.
He had found his path.

In 1837 he delivered the well-known Phi Beta Kappa oration at
Harvard on "The American Scholar." Emerson was now thirty-four;
he had married a second time, had bought a house of his own in
Concord, and purposed to make a living by lecturing and writing.
His address in Cambridge, though it contained no reference to
himself, was after all a justification of the way of life he had
chosen: a declaration of intellectual independence for himself
and his countrymen, an exhortation of self-trust to the
individual thinking man. "If the single man plant himself
indomitably on his instincts and there abide, the huge world will
come round to him." Such advice to cut loose from the moorings of
the past was not unknown in Phi Beta Kappa orations, though it
had never been so brilliantly phrased; but when Emerson applied
precisely the same doctrine, in 1838, to the graduating class at
the Harvard Divinity School, he roused a storm of disapproval. "A
tempest in our washbowl," he wrote coolly to Carlyle, but it was
more than that. The great sentence of the Divinity School
address, "God is, not was; he speaketh, not spake," was the