"
He widened his influence by substituting the platform for the pulpit, and
year after year he enlarged his circle of hearers. He lectured in New
England, the South, and the West. Sometimes these lecture tours kept him
away from home the entire winter. In 1847 he lectured in England and
Scotland. He visited Carlyle again, and for four days listened to "the
great and constant stream" of his talk. On this second trip abroad, Emerson
met men like De Quincey, Macaulay, Thackeray, and Tennyson. Emerson gained
such fame in the mother country that, long after he had returned, he was
nominated for the Lord Rectorship of Glasgow University and received five
hundred votes against seven hundred for Disraeli, one of England's best
known statesmen.
Something of his character and personality may be learned from the accounts
of contemporary writers. James Russell Lowell, who used to go again and
again to hear him, even when the subject was familiar, said, "We do not go
to hear what Emerson says so much as to hear Emerson." Hawthorne wrote, "It
was good to meet him in the wood paths or sometimes in our avenue with that
pure intellectual gleam diffusing about his presence like the garment of a
shining one.
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