Throughout the most fruitful years of Emerson's life he lived quietly in Concord, writing without hurry in the mornings, walking and talking with his friends who lived there and with the increasing number of more and less distinguished men who came to receive his inspiration. But three winter months of each year he gave to lecturing, giving frequent series in New York and Boston and going out into the West as far as Wisconsin and Missouri. In these months, as a combined prophet and man of business, he earned a fair share of his income and exerted his widest influence. What he meant to his auditors has been best said by Lowell in his brief essay on "Emerson the Lecturer." Recalling the days when he was a college student, sixteen years younger than Emerson, Lowell wrote: We used to walk in from the country [Cambridge, four miles out from Boston] to the Masonic Temple (I think it was) through the crisp winter night, and listen to that thrilling voice of his, so charged with subtle meaning and subtle music, as shipwrecked men on a raft to the hail of a ship that came with unhoped-for food and rescue.... And who that saw the audience will ever forget it, where everyone still capable of fire, or longing to renew in himself the half-forgotten sense of it, was gathered?... I hear again that rustle of sensation, as they turned to exchange glances over some pithier thought, some keener flash of that humor which always played about the horizon of his mind like heat-lightning.... To some of us that long-past experience remains as the most marvellous and fruitful we have ever had.... Did they say he was disconnected? So were the stars, that seemed larger to our eyes, as we walked homeward with prouder stride over the creaking snow. And were not _they_ knit together by a higher logic than our mere senses could master? Were we enthusiasts? I hope and believe we were, and am thankful to the man who made us worth something for once in our lives. If asked what was left? what we carried home? we should not have been careful for an answer. It would have been enough if we had said that something beautiful had passed that way.