Emerson's Italian Journey

Abstract

On Christmas day 1832 the twenty-nine-year-old Emerson, then a young Boston clergyman in ill health and low spirits, went aboard the brig “Jasper” and set off into the wintry north Atlantic just ahead of a storm. He was bound for the Mediterranean, for Italy, then Switzerland, France, and England. The trip would change his life. Emerson left home with his ministerial career broken off, uncertain of himself, and without an aim in life. He came back from Europe with a changed outlook, sure of himself, and with a new vocation. His six months in Italy prepared him for and led him toward a culminating moment in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, to a dramatic, decisive, career-changing moment of insight into the connection, not between man and God, but between the mind and the natural order of things, directing him away from theology, preaching, and scholarship, and providing a new imperative to become a naturalist and a teacher. Home again after the trip, he observed: “the teacher of the coming age must occupy himself in the study and explanation of the moral constitution of man more than in the elucidation of difficult texts.” When he left he was a minister without a church. When he returned he took up a new career as a public lecturer, and his first set of lectures would be on science, on natural history.