With impaired health and in despondency and grief (he had but recently lost his young wife)[19] Emerson tried the effect of a year abroad. He sailed from Boston and arrived at Malta on February 2, 1833. Thence he proceeded to Syracuse, Taormina, Messina, Palermo, and Naples. After visiting the other chief cities of Italy, he journeyed to Paris, which he admired none the less because he felt out of place there; ‘Pray what brought you here, grave Sir?’ the moving Boulevard seemed to say. But he had the opportunity of hearing Jouffroy at the Sorbonne, and of paying his respects to Lafayette. In London he saw Coleridge. At Edinburgh he learned Carlyle’s whereabouts, visited him, and found him, ‘good and wise and pleasant.’ He was unfortunate in his trip to the Highlands (‘the scenery of a shower-bath must be always much the same’). He called on Wordsworth at Rydal Mount. In early October he was back at home. The future was uncertain. Emerson was reluctant to give up the ministry, and preached from time to time as the chance presented itself. For some weeks he supplied Orville Dewey’s church in New Bedford, but when it was intimated that on Dewey’s resignation he might be invited to succeed him, Emerson made the impossible conditions that he should neither administer the Communion, nor offer prayer ‘unless he felt moved to do so.’ He supplied the pulpit of the Unitarian church in Concord during three months of the pastor’s illness and for three years preached to the little congregation in East Lexington. Having cut himself off from the only ‘regular’ mode of life that seemed open to him, Emerson took up the irregular vocation of lecturer. During the winter following his return from Europe, he had lectured before the Boston Society of Natural History. Beginning in January, 1835, he gave a course on ‘Biography’ consisting of six lectures: ‘Tests of Great Men,’ ‘Michelangelo,’ ‘Luther,’ ‘Milton,’ ‘Fox,’ and ‘Burke.’ During succeeding winters he gave ten lectures on ‘English Literature’ (1835–36), twelve lectures on ‘The Philosophy of History’ (1836–37), ten lectures on ‘Human Culture’ (1837–38), ten lectures on ‘Human Life’ (1838–39), ten lectures on ‘The Present Age’ (1839–40). He was now fairly engaged in his new calling. Meantime he had fixed on Concord for his permanent home, bought a house there, married Miss Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, and begun that career of which one of his biographers has humorously complained, ‘a life devoid of incident, of nearly untroubled happiness, and of absolute conformity to the moral law.’ In 1836 there was published anonymously a little volume entitled _Nature_. It was Emerson’s first book. His influence as a man of letters begins at this point. The succeeding volumes consisted in part of lectures which, having stood the test of public delivery, were now recast in essay form. Not every essay, however, had its first presentation as spoken discourse.