The five years just after graduation were not encouraging. He taught in his brother's school for a while, but loathed it because he taught so badly. Ill-health harassed him. While he was studying in the Divinity School his eyes failed him, so that he was excused from the regular examinations at the end. And a month after he was admitted to the ministry his doctor advised him to spend the winter in the South. It was not until 1829, when he was twenty-six years old, that he was settled in a pastorate. Then the future seemed assured for him. The church was an old and respected one, the congregation made up of "desirable" people. If the young preacher was able to prepare acceptable sermons and make friends among his parishioners, he could be sure of a permanent and dignified position in his native city. But although the flock were perfectly satisfied with their shepherd, in three years he resigned. He had found that certain of the forms of church worship embarrassed him because he could not always enter into the spirit of them. Sometimes when the moment for the "long prayer" came, he did not feel moved to utter it, and he felt that to "deliver" it as a piece of elocution was dishonest and irreverent. Administering the holy communion troubled him still more, because he felt afraid that to the literal Yankee mind this symbolical ceremony was either meaningless or tinged with superstition. So he expressed his honest doubts to his congregation, explaining that if these features of worship were necessary he could no longer continue to be their pastor, and they reluctantly let him go. Two years were yet to pass in the preparatory stage of Emerson's life. For the first seven months of 1833 he was abroad, traveling slowly from Italy up to England. In reading his daily comments on what he saw, one finds no trace of the eager zest for the novelties of travel enjoyed by Irving and Cooper; he seems rather to have gone through with the tour as a sober and conscientious process of education. His most vivid experiences were not in seeing places but in meeting English authors, and with one of these, Thomas Carlyle, he made the beginning of a lifelong friendship. It was like Emerson to be especially attracted to Carlyle, who was almost unknown at the time, to seek him out on his lonely Scotch farm, and to feel a deeper sympathy and admiration for him than for famous men like Wordsworth and Coleridge and De Quincey. No single man and no amount of public opinion ever made up this young American's mind for him. When, after a year of preaching and lecturing in America he went late in 1834 to settle in Concord, the richest memory he treasured from his travel was the founding of this new companionship. In the fabric of the long life that remained to him no two threads are more important than those of Concord and Carlyle--the place he loved most and the greatest of his friends.