Nature was followed in quick succession by two other major expressions of Transcendentalism, Emerson's "American Scholar" address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard (1837) and his "Divinity School Address" before the senior class of the Harvard Divinity School (1838). "The American Scholar," referred to by Oliver Wendell Holmes as "our intellectual Declaration of Independence," called for a new American thought based on intellectual self-reliance rather than the thought of the past. Published in 1837, it was well received. In "The "Divinity School Address," Emerson deplored the lack of vigor and meaning in established religion and urged men to form a more direct, individual understanding of God. "The Divinity School Address," also published the year it was delivered, was defended by those sympathetic to Transcendental thought and denounced by more conservative members of the Unitarian clergy and by biblical scholar and Harvard Divinity School professor Andrews Norton. (Norton's Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity was published in 1839.) As a result of "The Divinity School Address," Emerson was not welcome at Harvard for decades.
Emerson tried to remain above the controversy that "The Divinity School Address" generated. He continued lecturing and began to pull together his first collected edition of essays, which was published by Munroe in Boston under the title Essays in March of 1841. It was also issued by James Fraser in London, with a preface by Thomas Carlyle, in the same year, a fact that indicates the degree of recognition that Emerson had achieved by this time. The volume met with mixed reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. It was described in the New York Review for April 1841 as "a godless book" that the reviewer was inclined to censure both for its theology and its philosophy, a book in that "the meditative and wise man may find ambrosial food, but which will prove poison to the simple and undiscerning." A reviewer for the English Literary Gazette for September 25, 1841, stated that Essays "out-Carlyles Carlyle himself, exaggerates all his peculiarities and faults, and possesses very slight glimpses of his excellences." Although the reviews were mixed, Emerson's work was acknowledged as significant. His Essays: Second Series was published by Munroe in October of 1844 and in London by John Chapman in November of that year. This volume reinforced Emerson's reputation both in America and abroad. For the remainder of his life, even after his creative spark had died, he enjoyed a position of preeminence among American thinkers and men of letters.
