Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson was a seventh-generation New England minister who found, a few years into the work, that he could no longer administer a ritual he did not feel. He resigned his Boston pulpit at twenty-nine, sailed to Europe grieving his first wife, and came home resolved to speak only what he had verified in his own experience. In 1836 he published a small anonymous book called Nature; it became the founding document of Transcendentalism.

From his house in Concord he made his living on the lecture circuit — hundreds of towns, decades of winters — turning the lectures into the essays that made him the most famous thinker in America: Self-Reliance, Compensation, The Over-Soul, Experience. His study became the movement's meeting room; his generosity, its funding. He walked daily, kept a journal for sixty years, and mined it for every page he published.

What he preached, from the platform instead of the pulpit, was self-trust — not self-satisfaction, but the discipline of listening for the voice under the borrowed opinions, and acting on it. He buried a son, weathered mockery of his 'newness,' and kept lecturing into old age as his memory failed. Asked late in life what he had been doing all those years, he might have answered with his own line: the one thing in the world of value is the active soul.