The work consisted in bringing his thought to his public by means of lectures. He was not overfond of the medium of communication. ‘Are not lectures a kind of Peter Parley’s story of Uncle Plato, and a puppet show of the Eleusinian mysteries?’ he asks. It is not recorded what he thought of that kind of lecturing which may best be described in Byron’s phrase--‘to giggle and make giggle.’ He frankly (but unenviously) admired the speaker who could produce instantaneous effects, moving the audience to laughter or tears. His own gifts were of another sort. When ‘the stout Illinoisian’ after a short trial walked out of the hall Emerson’s sympathies were with him: ‘Shakespeare, or Franklin, or Esop, coming to Illinois, would say, I must give my wisdom a comic form,...’ Urged thereto by his generous friend Alexander Ireland of the Manchester ‘Examiner,’ who took on himself all the business responsibilities, Emerson (in 1847) made a lecturing trip to England. He spoke in Manchester, Edinburgh, London, and elsewhere. The lectures were ‘attacked by the clergymen,’ and the attacks met with ‘pale though brave defences’ by Emerson’s friends. After a few weeks in Paris, then in the throes of the revolution, the lecturer returned by way of England to America. The crisis in the anti-slavery conflict was approaching. Emerson, in spite of his philosophical attitude towards reformers, became more and more identified with the Abolitionists. During a political speech at Cambridge he was repeatedly hissed by students. According to an eye-witness, he ‘seemed absolutely to enjoy it.’ As late as 1861 he was received with marked hostility by the audience which gathered at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. ‘The Mob roared whenever I attempted to speak, and after several beginnings I withdrew.’ The breaking out of the war in a way relieved him. Now people knew where they stood. His chief source of income was cut off for a time. The public was not in the mood for lectures such as his. Later he found it possible to resume his courses, and he continued to lecture effectively until within a few years of his death. Emerson’s principal books are: _Nature_, 1836; _Essays_, 1841; _Essays_, ‘second series,’ 1844; _Poems_, 1847; _Miscellanies_, 1849 (lectures and addresses, together with a reprint of _Nature_); _Representative Men_, 1850; _English Traits_, 1856; _Conduct of Life_, 1860; _May-Day and Other Pieces_, 1867; _Society and Solitude_, 1870; _Letters and Social Aims_, 1876; _Lectures and Biographical Sketches_, 1884; and _Natural History of Intellect_, 1893. He edited a number of Carlyle’s books, contributed several chapters to the _Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli_ and compiled a poetic anthology, _Parnassus_, 1875. _The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson_ (edited by C. E. Norton), 1883, contains two hundred of Emerson’s letters.