years he preached with some regularity in various pulpits, but he gradually abandoned the church for the lyceum, which invited him as far west as Wisconsin and Illinois. He made a second visit to England in 1848. For the most part, barring his winter lecturing tours and an occasional excursion to deliver a commencement address or a Phi Beta Kappa oration, he lived placidly in Concord, reading, meditating, writing, editing the short-lived transcendental Dial, looking amusedly askance upon the Brook Farm experiment, and walking and talking with his famous fellow-villagers, the Alcotts, the Hawthornes, Margaret Fuller, Ellery Channing, and Thoreau.
What ferment of radical thought went on beneath the decorous exterior of that quiet scholar's life we know with remarkable fulness and accuracy. From early boyhood Emerson kept a journal—a habit, in his case, denoting a mind disposed to make unusual exactions of the "hypocritic days." At first, he is much occupied with what he has read or proposes to read; but presently his note-book becomes a kind of storehouse for mellowing the fruits of his daily meditations, and an experimental garden for planting the seeds of new thoughts gathered on his intellectual adventures. The Journals, now published in twelve volumes, give us an invaluable commentary upon the long-familiar essays, and they enrich greatly our sense of the personality behind them. Especially they illuminate
