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." Carlyle speaks of seeing him "vanish like an angel" from his lonely Scotch home. Emerson died in 1882 and was buried near Hawthorne, in Sleepy Hollow cemetery at Concord, on the "hilltop hearsed with pines." Years before he had said, "I have scarce a daydream on which the breath of the pines has not blown and their shadow waved." The pines divide with an unhewn granite boulder the honor of being his monument. EARLY PROSE.--Before he was thirty-five, Emerson had produced some prose which, so far as America is concerned, might be considered epoch-making in two respects: (1) in a new philosophy of nature, not new to the world, but new in the works of our authors and fraught with new inspiration to Americans; and (2) in a new doctrine of self-reliance and intellectual independence for the New World. [Illustration: EMERSON'S GRAVE, CONCORD] In 1836 he published a small volume entitled _Nature_, containing fewer than a hundred printed pages, but giving in embryo almost all the peculiar, idealistic philosophy that he afterwards elaborated. By "Nature" he sometimes means everything that is not his own soul, but he also uses the word in its common significance, and talks of the beauty in cloud, river, forest, and flower. Although _Nature_ is written in prose, it is evident that the author is a poet. He says:-- "How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams."