On his return, he served as a supply minister in various Unitarian parishes — a practice that he continued for years — and took up a new career as a lecturer, an occupation that engaged him for over four decades. The rise of the lyceum in America fortuitously coincided with Emerson's need to find a new occupation. Lecturing allowed him to draw on skills that he had developed as a preacher, gave him scope to refine ideas on God, man, and nature that he had been pondering, and fostered expression of his literary aspirations. Moreover, it provided an income. He delivered his "Uses of Natural History" in Boston in November 1833, proclaiming, "The whole of Nature is a metaphor or image of the human mind." Shortly thereafter, he lectured "On the Relation of Man to the Globe." Years of reading, thinking, and journalizing were shaping a new understanding of man's place in the universe, which the lecture platform permitted him to develop more fully and to clothe in powerful, suggestive vocabulary and style. The influence of his reading — he was stimulated by the German philosophers, Goethe, Plato, the Neoplatonic writers, eastern sacred books, the English Romantics, the Swedish mystic Swedenborg, Montaigne, and others — converged and reacted with his Unitarian background and were distilled into his own particular brand of visionary idealism as he readied his thoughts for public presentation. He delivered lectures (which he read to his audiences) on a range of subjects — among them history, Italy, and great men (including Michelangelo, Martin Luther, and John Milton). He presented a lecture series titled "The Philosophy of History," "Human Culture," and "The Present Age." And he found success. Audiences were ready to hear what Emerson had to say.
Having established himself as a lecturer and looking forward to a literary career, Emerson settled in Concord, the home of his ancestors, a place that offered peace and access both to nature and to the advantages of Boston. In October of 1834, just two weeks after Edward's death in Puerto Rico, Emerson and his mother moved into the Old Manse as Ezra Ripley's boarders. While living at the Manse, Emerson worked at writing Nature, which upon publication in 1836 would unleash a period of intense expression of Transcendental thought, and reaction to it.
