Volume 1 — CORRESPONDENCE OF CARLYLE AND EMERSON (continued 6)

It is some two months since I got into this region; my Wife followed me with her maid and equipments some five weeks ago. Newington Lodge, when I came to inspect it with eyes, proved to be too rough an undertaking: upholsterers, expense and confusion,—the Cynic snarled, "Give me a whole Tub rather! I want nothing but shelter from the elements, and to be let alone of all men." After a little groping, this little furnished cottage, close by the beach of the Solway Frith, was got hold of: here we have been, in absolute seclusion, for a month,—no company but the corn-fields and the everlasting sands and brine; mountains, and thousand-voiced memories on all hands, sending their regards to one, from the distance. Daily (sometimes even nightly!) I have swashed about in the sea; I have been perfectly idle, at least inarticulate; I fancy I feel myself considerably sounder of body and of mind. Deeply do I agree with you in the great unfathomable meaning of a colloquy with the dumb Ocean, with the dumb Earth, and their eloquence! A Legislator would prescribe some weeks of that annually as a religious duty for all mortals, if he could. A Legislator will prescribe it for himself, since he can! You too have been at Nantasket; my Friend, this great rough purple sea-flood that roars under my little garret-window here, this too comes from Nantasket and farther,—swung hitherward by the Moon and the Sun.

It cannot be said that I feel "happy" here, which means joyful;— as far as possible from that. The Cave of Trophonius could not be grimmer for one than this old Land of Graves. But it is a sadness worth any hundred "happinesses." N'en parlons plus. By the way, have you ever clearly remarked withal what a despicable function "view-hunting" is. Analogous to "philanthropy," "pleasures of virtue," &c., &c. I for my part, in these singular circumstances, often find an honestly ugly country the preferable one. Black eternal peat-bog, or these waste-howling sands with mews and seagulls: you meet at least no Cockney to exclaim, "How charming it is!"

One of the last things I did in London was to pocket Bookseller Brown's L38: a very honest-looking man, that Brown; whom I was sorry I could not manage to welcome better. You asked in that Letter about some other item of business,—Munroe's or Brown's account to acknowledge?—something or other that I was to do: I only remember vaguely that it seemed to me I had as good as done it. Your Letter is not here now, but at Chelsea.

Three sheets of the Essays lay waiting me at my Mother's, for correction; needing as good as none. The type and shape is the same as that of late Lectures on Heroes. Robson the Printer, who is a very punctual intelligent man, a scholar withal, undertook to be himself the corrector of the other sheets. I hope you will find them "exactly conformable to the text, minus mere Typographical blunders and the more salient American spellings (labor for labour, &c.)." The Book is perhaps just getting itself subscribed in these very days. It should have been out before now: but poor Fraser is in the country, dangerously ill, which perhaps retards it a little; and the season, at any rate, is at the very dullest. By the first conveyance I will send a certain Lady two copies of it. Little danger but the Edition will sell; Fraser knows his own Trade well enough, and is as much a "desperado" as poor Attila Schmelzle was! Poor James, I wish he were well again; but really at times I am very anxious about him.—The Book will sell; will be liked and disliked. Harriet Martineau, whom I saw in passing hitherward, writes with her accustomed enthusiasm about it. Richard Milnes too is very warm. John Sterling scolds and kisses it (as the manner of the man is), and concludes by inquiring, whether there is any procurable Likeness of Emerson? Emerson himself can answer. There ought to be.

—Good Heavens! Here came my Wife, all in tears, pointing out to me a poor ship, just tumbled over on a sand-bank on the Cumberland coast; men still said to be alive on it,—a Belfast steamer doing all it can to get in contact with it! Moments are precious (say the people on the beach), the flood runs ten miles an hour. Thank God, the steamer's boat is out: "eleven men," says a person with a glass, "are saved: it is an American timber-ship, coming up without a Pilot." And now—in ten minutes more—there lies the melancholy mass alone among the waters, wreck-boats all hastening towards it, like birds of prey; the poor Canadians all up and away towards Annan. What an end for my Letter, which nevertheless must end! Adieu, dear Emerson. Address to Chelsea next time. I can say no more.

Yours ever, T.C.

LXIX. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 30 October, 1841

My Dear Carlyle,—I was in Boston yesterday, and found at Munroe's your promised packet of the two London Books. They are very handsome,—that for my wife is beautiful,—and I am not so old or so cold but that I can feel the hope and the pleasure that lie in this gift. It seems I am to speak in England—great England—fortified by the good word of one whose word is fame. Well, it is a lasting joy to be indebted to the wise and generous; and I am well contented that my little boat should swim, whilst it can, beside your great galleys, nor will I allow my discontent with the great faults of the book, which the rich English dress cannot hide, to spoil my joy in this fine little romance of friendship and hope. I am determined—so help me all Muses—to send you something better another day.

But no more printing for me at present. I have just decided to go to Boston once more, with a course of lectures, which I will perhaps baptize "On the Times," by way of making once again the experiment whether I cannot, not only speak the truth, but speak it truly, or in proportion. I fancy I need more than another to speak, with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders; somebody asked me "if I built of medals." Besides, I am always haunted with brave dreams of what might be accomplished in the lecture-room,—so free and so unpretending a platform,—a Delos not yet made fast. I imagine an eloquence of infinite variety,—rich as conversation can be, with anecdote, joke, tragedy, epics and pindarics, argument and confession. I should love myself wonderfully better if I could arm myself to go, as you go, with the word in the heart and not in a paper.

When I was in Boston I saw the booksellers, the children of Tantalus,—no, but they who trust in them are. This time, Little and Brown render us their credit account to T.C. $366 (I think it was), payable in three months from 1 October. They had sold all the London French Revolutions but fifteen copies. May we all live until 1 January. J. Munroe & Co. acknowledge about $180 due and now rightfully payable to T.C., but, unhappily, not yet paid. By the help of brokers, I will send that sum more or less in some English Currency, by the next steamship, which sails in about a fortnight, and will address it, as you last bade me, to Chelsea.

What news, my dear friend, from your study? what designs ripened or executed? what thoughts? what hopes? you can say nothing of yourself that will not greatly interest us all. Harriet Martineau, whose sicknesses may it please God to heal! wrote me a kind, cheerful letter, and the most agreeable notice of your health and spirit on a visit at her house. My little boy is five years old today, and almost old enough to send you his love.

With kindest greetings to Jane Carlyle, I am her and your friend,

—R.W.E.

LXX. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 14 November, 1841

My Dear Carlyle,—Above, you have a bill of exchange for forty pounds sterling, with which sum you must credit the Munroe account. The bill, I must not fail to notice, is drawn by a lover of yours who expresses great satisfaction in doing us this courtesy; and courtesy I must think it when he gives me a bill at sight, whilst of all other merchants I have got only one payable at some remote day. —— is a beautiful and noble youth, of a most subtle and magnetic nature, made for an artist, a painter, and in his art has made admirable sketches, but his criticism, I fancy, was too keen for his poetry (shall I say?); he sacrificed to Despair, and threw away his pencil. For the present, he buys and sells. I wrote you some sort of letter a fortnight ago, promising to send a paper like this. The hour when this should be despatched finds me by chance very busy with little affairs. I sent you by an Italian, Signor Gambardella,*— who took a letter to you with good intent to persuade you to sit to him for your portrait,—a Dial, and some copies of an oration I printed lately. If you should have any opportunity to send one of them to Harriet Martineau, my debts to her are great, and I wish to acknowledge her abounding kindness by a letter, as I must. I am now in the rage of preparation for my Lectures "On the Times;" which begin in a fortnight. There shall be eight, but I cannot yet accurately divide the topics. If it were eighty, I could better. In fear lest this sheet should not safely and timely reach its man, I must now write some duplicate.

Farewell, dear friend. R.W. Emerson

———— * Spiridione Gambardella was born at Naples. He was a refugee from Italy, having escaped, the story was, on board an American man-of-war. He had been educated as a public singer, but he had a facile genius, and turned readily to painting as a means of livelihood. He painted some excellent portraits in Boston, between 1835 and 1840, among them one of Dr. Channing, and one of Dr. Follen; both of these were engraved. He had some success for a time as a portrait-painter in London. —————

LXXI. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 19 November, 1841

Dear Emerson,—Since that going down of the American Timber-ship on one of the Banks of the Solway under my window, I do not remember that you have heard a word of me. I only added that the men were all saved, and the beach all in agitation, certain women not far from hysterics;—and there ended. I did design to send you some announcement of our return hither; but fear there is no chance that I did it! About ten days ago the Signor Gambardella arrived, with a Note and Books from you: and here now is your Letter of October 30th; which, arriving at a moment when I have a little leisure, draws forth an answer almost instantly.

The Signor Gambardella, whom we are to see a second time tonight or tomorrow, amuses and interests us not a little. His face is the very image of the Classic God Pan's; with horns, and cloven feet, we feel that he would make a perfect wood-god;—really, some of Poussin's Satyrs are almost portraits of this brave Gambardella. I will warrant him a right glowing mass of Southern-Italian vitality,—full of laughter, wild insight, caricature, and every sort of energy and joyous savagery: a most profitable element to get introduced (in moderate quantity), I should say, into the general current of your Puritan blood over in New England there! Gambardella has behaved with magnanimity in that matter of the Portrait: I have already sat, to men in the like case, some four times, and Gambardella knows it is a dreadful weariness; I directed him, accordingly, to my last painter, one Laurence, a man of real parts, whom I wished Gambardella to know,—and whom I wished to know Gambardella withal, that he might tell me whether there was any probability of a good picture by him in case one did decide on encountering the weariness. Well: Gambardella returns with a magnanimous report that Laurence's picture far transcends any capability of his; that whoever in America or elsewhere will have a likeness of the said individual must apply to Laurence, not to Gambardella,—which latter artist heroically throws down his brush, and says, Be it far from me! The brave Gambardella! if I can get him this night to dilate a little farther on his Visit to the Community of Shakers, and the things he saw and felt there, it will be a most true benefit to me. Inextinguishable laughter seemed to me to lie in Gambardella's vision of that Phenomenon,— the sight and the seer, but we broke out too loud all at once, and he was afraid to continue.—Alas! there is almost no laughter going in the world at present. True laughter is as rare as any other truth,—the sham of it frequent and detestable, like all other shams. I know nothing wholesomer; but it is rarer even than Christmas, which comes but once a year, and does always come once.

Your satisfactions and reflections at sight of your English Book are such as I too am very thankful for. I understand them well. May worse guest never visit the Drawing-room at Concord than that bound Book. Tell the good Wife to rejoice in it: she has all the pleasure;—to her poor Husband it will be increase of pain withal: nay, let us call it increase of valiant labor and endeavor; no evil for a man, if he be fit for it! A man must learn to digest praise too, and not be poisoned with it: some of it is wholesome to the system under certain circumstances; the most of it a healthy system will learn by and by to throw into the slop-basin, harmlessly, without any trial to digest it. A thinker, I take it, in the long run finds that essentially he must ever be and continue alone;—alone: "silent, rest over him the stars, and under him the graves"! The clatter of the world, be it a friendly, be it a hostile world, shall not intermeddle with him much. The Book of Essays, however, does decidedly "speak to England," in its way, in these months; and even makes what one may call a kind of appropriate "sensation" here. Reviews of it are many, in all notes of the gamut;—of small value mostly; as you might see by the two Newspaper specimens I sent you. (Did you get those two Newspapers?) The worst enemy admits that there are piercing radiances of perverse insight in it; the highest friends, some few, go to a very high point indeed. Newspapers are busy with extracts;—much complaining that it is "abstruse," neological, hard to get the meaning of. All which is very proper. Still better,—though poor Fraser, alas, is dead, (poor Fraser!), and no help could come from industries of the Bookshop, and Books indeed it seems were never selling worse than of late months,—I learn that the "sale of the Essays goes very steadily forward," and will wind itself handsomely up in due time, we may believe! So Emerson henceforth has a real Public in Old England as well as New. And finally, my Friend, do not disturb yourself about turning better, &c., &c.; write as it is given you, and not till it be given you, and never mind it a whit.

The new Adelphi piece seems to me, as a piece of Composition, the best written of them all. People cry over it: "Whitherward? What, What?" In fact, I do again desiderate some concretion of these beautiful abstracta. It seems to me they will never be right otherwise; that otherwise they are but as prophecies yet, not fulfilments.

The Dial too, it is all spirit-like, aeriform, aurora-borealis like. Will no Angel body himself out of that; no stalwart Yankee man, with color in the cheeks of him, and a coat on his back! These things I say: and yet, very true, you alone can decide what practical meaning is in them. Write you always as it is given you,_ be it in the solid, in the aeriform, or whatsoever way. There is no other rule given among men.—I have sent the criticism on Landor* to an Editorial Friend of L.'s, by whom I expect it will be put into the Newspapers here, for the benefit of Walter Savage; he is not often so well praised among us, and deserves a little good praise.

———— * From the Dial for October, 1841. ————

You propose again to send me Moneys,—surprising man! I am glad also to hear that that beggarly misprinted French Revolution is nearly out among you. I only hope farther your Booksellers will have an eye on that rascal Appleton, and not let him reprint and deface, if more copies of the Book turn out to be wanted. Adieu, dear Emerson! Good speed to you at Boston, and in all true things. I hope to write soon again.

Yours ever, T. Carlyle

LXXII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 6 December, 1841

Dear Emerson,—Though I wrote to you very lately, and am in great haste today, I must lose no time in announcing that the Letter with the L40 draught came to hand some mornings ago; and now, this same morning, a second Letter round by Dumfriesshire, which had been sent as a duplicate, or substitute in case of accident, for the former. It is all right, my friend ——'s paper has got itself changed into forty gold sovereigns, and lies here waiting use; thanks, many thanks! Sums of that kind come always upon me like manna out of the sky; surely they, more emphatically than any others, are the gift of Heaven. Let us receive, use, and be thankful. I am not so poor now at all; Heaven be praised: indeed, I do not know, now and then when I reflect on it, whether being rich were not a considerably harder problem. With the wealth of Rothschild what farther good thing could one get,—if not perhaps some but to live in, under free skies, in the country, with a horse to ride and have a little less pain on? Angulus ille ridet!—I will add, for practical purposes in the future, that it is in general of little or no moment whether an American Bill be at sight or after a great many days; that the paper can wait as conveniently here as the cash can,—if your New England House and Baring of Old England will forbear bankruptcy in the mean while. By the bye, will you tell me some time or other in what American funds it is that your funded money, you once gave me note of, now lies? I too am creditor to America,— State of Illinois or some such State: one thousand dollars of mine, which some years ago I had no use for, now lies there, paying I suppose for canals, in a very obstructed condition! My Brother here is continually telling me that I shall lose it all, —which is not so bad; but lose it all by my own unreason,—which is very bad. It struck me I would ask where Emerson's money lies, and lay mine there too, let it live or perish as it likes!

Your Adelphi went straightway off to Miss Martineau with a message. Richard Milnes has another; John Sterling is to have a third,—had certain other parties seen it first. For the man Emerson is become a person to be seen in these times. I also gave a Morning-Chronicle Editor your brave eulogy on Landor, with instructions that it were well worth publishing there, for Landor's and others' sake. Landor deserves more praise than he gets at present; the world too, what is far more, should hear of him oftener than it does. A brave man after his kind,—though considerably "flamed on from the Hell beneath." He speaks notable things; and at lowest and worst has the faculty too of holding his peace.

The "Lectures on the Times" are even now in progress? Good speed to the Speaker, to the Speech. Your Country is luckier than most at this time; it has still real Preaching; the tongue of man is not, whensoever it begins wagging, entirely sure to emit babblement, twaddlement, sincere—cant, and other noises which awaken the passionate wish for silence! That must alter everywhere the human tongue is no wooden watchman's-rattle or other obsolete implement; it continues forever new and useful, nay indispensable.

As for me and my doings—Ay de mi!*

———- * The signature has been cut off. ———-

LXXIII. Emerson to Carlyle

New York, 28 February, 1842

My Dear Friend,—I enclose a bill of exchange for forty-eight pounds sterling, payable by Baring Brothers & Co. after sixty days from the 25th of February.

This Sum is part of a payment from Little and Brown on account of sales of your London French Revolution and of Chartism. As another part of their payment they asked me if they might not draw on the estate of James Fraser for a balance due from his house to them, and pay you so. I, perhaps unwisely, consented to make the proffer to you, with the distinct stipulation, however, that if it should not prove perfectly agreeable to you, and exactly as available as another form of money, you should instantly return it to me, and they shall pay me the amount, $41.57, or L8 12s. 5d. in cash. My mercantile friend, Abel Adams, did not admire my wisdom in accepting this bill of Little and Brown; so I told them I should probably bring it back to them, and if there is a shadow of inconvenience in it you will send it back to me by the next steamer. For they have no claims on us. I decide not to enclose the Little and Brown bill in this sheet,—but to let it accompany this letter in the same packet.

I grieve to hear that you have bought any of our wretched Southern Stocks. In New England all Southern and Southwestern debt is usually regarded as hopeless, unless the debtor is personally known. Massachusetts stock is in the best credit of any public stock. Ward told me that it would be safest for you to keep your Illinois stock, although he could say nothing very good of it.

Our city banks in Boston are in better credit than the banks in any other city here, yet one in which a large part of my own property is invested has failed, for the two last half-years, to pay any dividend, and I am a poor man until next April, when, I hope, it will not fail me again. If you wish to invest money here, my friend Abel Adams, who is the principal partner in one of our best houses, Barnard, Adams, & Co., will know how to give you the best assistance and action the case admits.

My dear friend, you should have had this letter and these messages by the last steamer; but when it sailed, my son, a perfect little boy of five years and three months, had ended his earthly life.* You can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such a young child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a very rich man, and now the poorest of all. What would it avail to tell you anecdotes of a sweet and wonderful boy, such as we solace and sadden ourselves with at home every morning and evening? From a perfect health and as happy a life and as happy influences as ever child enjoyed, he was hurried out of my arms in three short days by Scarlatina.—We have two babes yet,—one girl of three years, and one girl of three months and a week, but a promise like that Boy's I shall never see. How often I have pleased myself that one day I should send to you this Morning Star of mine, and stay at home so gladly behind such a representative. I dare not fathom the Invisible and Untold to inquire what relations to my Departed ones I yet sustain. Lidian, the poor Lidian, moans at home by day and by night. You too will grieve for us, afar. I believe I have two letters from you since I wrote last. I shall write again soon, for Bronson Alcott will probably go to London in about a month, and him I shall surely send to you, hoping to atone by his great nature for many smaller one, that have craved to see you. Give me early advice of receiving these Bills of Exchange.

————- * The memory of this Boy, "born for the future, to the future lost;" is enshrined in the heart of every lover of childhood and of poetry by his father's impassioned Threnody. —————-

Tell Jane Carlyle our sorrowing story with much love, and with all good hope for her health and happiness. Tell us when you write, with as much particularity as you can, how it stands with you, and all your household; with the Doctor, and the friends; what you do, and propose to do, and whether you will yet come to America, one good day?

Yours with love, R. Waldo Emerson

LXXIV. Carlyle to Emerson

Templand, Thornhill, Dumfries, Scotland 28 March, 1842

My Dear Friend,—This is heavy news that you send me; the heaviest outward bereavement that can befall a man has overtaken you. Your calm tone of deep, quiet sorrow, coming in on the rear of poor trivial worldly businesses, all punctually despatched and recorded too, as if the Higher and Highest had not been busy with you, tells me a sad tale. What can we say in these cases? There is nothing to be said,—nothing but what the wild son of Ishmael, and every thinking heart, from of old have learned to say: God is great! He is terrible and stern; but we know also He is good. "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." Your bright little Boy, chief of your possessions here below, is rapt away from you; but of very truth he is with God, even as we that yet live are,—and surely in the way that was best for him, and for you, and for all of us.—Poor Lidian Emerson, poor Mother! To her I have no word. Such poignant unspeakable grief, I believe, visits no creature as that of a Mother bereft of her child. The poor sparrow in the bush affects one with pity, mourning for its young; how much more the human soul of one's Friend! I cannot bid her be of comfort; for there is as yet no comfort. May good Influences watch over her, bring her some assuagement. As the Hebrew David said, "We shall go to him, he will not return to us."

I also am here in a house rendered vacant and sacred by Death. A sore calamity has fallen on us, or rather has fallen on my poor Wife (for what am I but like a spectator in comparison?): she has lost unexpectedly her good Mother, her sole surviving Parent, and almost only relative of much value that was left to her. The manner too was almost tragic. We had heard of illness here, but only of commonplace illness, and had no alarm. The Doctor himself, specially applied to, made answer as if there was no danger: his poor Patient, in whose character the like of that intimately lay, had rigorously charged him to do so: her poor Daughter was far off, confined to her room by illness of her own; why alarm her, make her wretched? The danger itself did seem over; the Doctor accordingly obeyed. Our first intimation of alarm was despatched on the very day which proved the final one. My poor Wife, casting sickness behind her, got instantly ready, set off by the first railway train: traveling all night, on the morrow morning at her Uncle's door in Liverpool she is met by tidings that all is already ended. She broke down there; she is now home again at Chelsea, a cheery, amiable younger Jane Welsh to nurse her: the tone of her Letters is still full of disconsolateness. I had to proceed hither, and have to stay here till this establishment can be abolished, and all the sad wrecks of it in some seemly manner swept away. It is above three weeks that I have been here; not till eight days ago could I so much as manage to command solitude, to be left altogether alone. I lead a strange life; full of sadness, of solemnity, not without a kind of blessedness. I say it is right and fitting that one be left entirely alone now and then, alone with one's own griefs and sins, with the mysterious ancient Earth round one, the everlasting Heaven over one, and what one can make of these. Poor rustic businesses, subletting of Farms, disposal of houses, household goods: these strangely intervene, like matter upon spirit, every day;—wholesome this too perhaps. It is many years since I have stood so in close contact face to face with the reality of Earth, with its haggard ugliness, its divine beauty, its depths of Death and of Life. Yesterday, one of, the stillest Sundays, I sat long by the side of the swift river Nith; sauntered among woods all vocal only with rooks and pairing birds.* The hills are often white with snow-powder, black brief spring-tempests rush fiercely down from them, and then again the sky looks forth with a pale pure brightness,—like Eternity from behind Time. The Sky, when one thinks of it, is always blue, pure changeless azure; rains and tempests are only for the little dwellings where men abide. Let us think of this too. Think of this, thou sorrowing Mother! Thy Boy has escaped many showers.

————- * "Templand has a very fine situation; old Walter's walk, at the south end of the house, was one of the most picturesque and pretty to be found in the world. Nith valley (river half a mile off, winding through green holms, now in its border of clean shingle, now lost in pleasant woods and rushes) lay patent to the South. "Carlyle's Reminiscences," Vol. II. p. 137. ————-

In some three weeks I shall probably be back at Chelsea. Write thitherward so soon as you have opportunity; I will write again before long, even if I do not hear from you. The moneys, &c. are all safe here as you describe: if Fraser's' Executors make any demur, your Bookseller shall soon hear of it.

I had begun to write some Book on Cromwell: I have often begun, but know not how to set about it; the most unutterable of all subjects I ever felt much meaning to lie in. There is risk yet that, with the loss of still farther labor, I may have to abandon it;—and then the great dumb Oliver may lie unspoken forever; gathered to the mighty Silent of the Earth; for, I think, there will hardly ever live another man that will believe in him and his Puritanism as I do. To him small matter.

Adieu, my good kind Friend, ever dear to me, dearer now in sorrow. My Wife when she hears of your affliction will send a true thought over to you also. The poor Lidian!—John Sterling is driven off again, setting out I think this very day for Gibraltar, Malta, and Naples. Farewell, and better days to us.

Your affectionate T. Carlyle

LXXV. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 81 March, 1842

My Dear Carlyle,—I wrote you a letter from my brother's office in New York nearly a month ago to tell you how hardly it had fared with me here at home, that the eye of my home was plucked out when that little innocent boy departed in his beauty and perfection from my sight. Well, I have come back hither to my work and my play, but he comes not back, and I must simply suffer it. Doubtless the day will come which will resolve this, as everything gets resolved, into light, but not yet.

I write now to tell you of a piece of life. I wish you to know that there is shortly coming to you a man by the name of Bronson Alcott. If you have heard his name before, forget what you have heard. Especially if you have ever read anything to which this name was attached, be sure to forget that; and, inasmuch as in you lies, permit this stranger when he arrives at your gate to make a new and primary impression. I do not wish to bespeak any courtesies or good or bad opinion concerning him. You may love him, or hate him, or apathetically pass by him, as your genius shall dictate; only I entreat this, that you do not let him go quite out of your reach until you are sure you have seen him and know for certain the nature of the man. And so I leave contentedly my pilgrim to his fate.

I should tell you that my friend Margaret Fuller, who has edited our little Dial with such dubious approbation on the part of you and other men, has suddenly decided a few days ago that she will edit it no more. The second volume was just closing; shall it live for a third year? You should know that, if its interior and spiritual life has been ill fed, its outward and bibliopolic existence has been worse managed. Its publishers failed, its short list of subscribers became shorter, and it has never paid its laborious editor, who has been very generous of her time and labor, the smallest remuneration. Unhappily, to me alone could the question be put whether the little aspiring starveling should be reprieved for another year. I had not the cruelty to kill it, and so must answer with my own proper care and nursing for its new life. Perhaps it is a great folly in me who have little adroitness in turning off work to assume this sure vexation, but the Dial has certain charms to me as an opportunity, which I grudge to destroy. Lately at New York I found it to be to a certain class of men and women, though few, an object of tenderness and religion. You cannot believe it?

Mr. Lee,* who brings you this letter, is the son of one of the best men in Massachusetts, a man whose name is a proverb among merchants for his probity, for his sense and his information. The son, who bears his father's name, is a favorite among all the young people for his sense and spirit, and has lived always with good people.

————- * Mr. Henry Lee. ————

I have read at New York six out of eight lectures on the Times which I read this winter in Boston. I found a very intelligent and friendly audience. The penny papers reported my lectures, somewhat to my chagrin when I tried to read them; many persons came and talked with me, and I felt when I came away that New York is open to me henceforward whenever my Boston parish is not large enough. This summer, I must try to set in order a few more chapters from these rambling lectures, one on "The Poet" and one on "Character" at least. And now will you not tell me what you read and write? Is it Cromwell still? For I supposed from the Westminster piece that the laborer must be in that quarter.

I send herewith a new Dial, No. 8, and the last of this dispensation. I hope you have received every number. They have been sent in order. I have written no line in this Number. I send a letter for Sterling, as I do not know whether his address is still at Falmouth. Is he now a preacher? By the "Acadia" you should have received a letter of exchange on the Barings, and another on James Fraser's estate.

With constant good hope for yourself and for your wife, I am your friend,

—R.W. Emerson

End of Vol. I.