Emerson’s First Journey to Europe
The Jardin des Plantes ("Botanical Garden") in Paris, France.
In September of 1832 Emerson resigned as pastor of the Second Church in Boston, and on Christmas Day he sailed for Europe. Ellen Tucker Emerson, his wife of less than two years, had passed away in 1831 and Emerson was in deep mourning.
Emerson suddenly decided to go to Europe to get relief from an illness and to hopefully meet with writers he viewed as kindred spirits. It was his first trip to Europe, but not his last; he subsequently made two more visits.
His ship landed in February 1833 on the island of Malta and he stayed in Italy until June. In March, Emerson climbed Mt. Vesuvius, writing in his journal, “We got to the top & looked down into the red & yellow pits the navel of this volcano.”
He met with the writer Walter Savage Landor and explored Florence, Rome, Venice, and Milan. In Paris, he visited the Jardin des Plantes. The massive botanical garden had a powerful effect on Emerson. He wrote, “I feel the centipede in me – cayman, carp, eagle, & fox. I am moved by strange sympathies, I say continually ‘I will be a naturalist.’”
When he arrived in England, Emerson sought out the writers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, and, in Scotland, Thomas Carlyle. Coleridge he found “old and preoccupied” and was frustrated that it was very much a one-sided conversation.
Eager to meet Carlyle and Wordsworth, he wrote, “Am I, who have hung over their works in my chamber at home, not to see these men in the flesh, and thank them, and interchange some thoughts with them, when I am passing their very doors?” Emerson made the long trek to visit Carlyle at his farm, which was south of Glasgow. The meeting was the start of a lifelong and cherished friendship between the two great writers. Emerson wrote, “The comfort of meeting a man of genius is that he speaks sincerely…”
His final visit was to the acclaimed poet William Wordsworth. While enjoying his visits with Wordsworth and Coleridge, Emerson was less impressed than he expected to be—leading him to understand that ‘ordinary’ people could succeed with trust in themselves. A few years later, he wrote, “Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books.”
As he waited for his return voyage to America, Emerson wrote, “I thank the Great God who has led me through this European scene, this last schoolroom in which he has pleased to instruct me…” He continued, “The comfort of meeting men of genius such as these is that they talk sincerely, they feel themselves to be so rich that they are above the meanness of pretending to knowledge which they have not, and they frankly tell you what puzzles them. But Carlyle – Carlyle is so amiable that I love him.”
All quotations are from Emerson’s journals.
— B. Ewen, Emerson House guide
