ABSTRACT
In August of 1835 Emerson was planning to remarry and to move from Boston to Concord, and was beginning to muse upon a future project that would describe the “Literary Ethics or the Duty & Discipline of a Scholar.” He had fi nished a series of lectures on biography and, infl uenced by Coleridge and Goethe, was reading avidly and widely in the natural history of the era. As one of Boston’s most promising young Unitarians, Emerson had announced from the pulpit a year earlier his dissatisfaction with the Unitarians’ traditional approach to Scripture and his attraction to exciting new sources of revelation in astronomy, chemistry, and geology. The Lyell of Emerson’s journal entry’s “Hurra” was Charles Lyell, a Scottish-born barrister and amateur geologist whose massive Principles of Geology had begun to appear in 1831 and had quickly gained a popular audience in England in an age when geological treatises had broad appeal. Emerson’s hope to fi nd something congenial to his work in reading Lyell was not a private eccentricity; the intellectual elites of the era had been galvanized by the new scientifi c discoveries. Despite Emerson’s wish to get to Lyell, he did not do so for over a year. During these months Emerson remarried, lost his favorite brother, Charles, and spent weeks in “helpless mourning” for him; met Margaret Fuller and hosted her in Concord, attended the fi rst meeting of Frederick Henry Hedge’s Transcendentalist Club, and completed his little book, Nature, which appeared anonymously in Boston in September (Qtd. in Richardson 225). It was not until October 1836 that Emerson borrowed the fi rst two volumes of Principles of Geology from the Boston Atheneum. Remarkably enough, however, given his usual enthusiasm for the new geological ideas, when the books had been in his house for a few days he complained in a note to Margaret Fuller, “Lyell did not please me, for it was only a catalogue of facts” (Letters 2:41; Qtd. in Richardson 254).
