must be blind and deaf if the Professor makes no more impression there than yet appears. I, with the most affectionate wishes for Thomas Carlyle's fame, am mainly bent on securing the medicinal virtues of his book for my young neighbors. The good people think he overpraises Goethe. There I give him up to their wrath. But I bid them mark his unsleeping moral sentiment; that every other moralist occasionally nods, becomes complaisant and traditional; but this man is without interval on the side of equity and humanity! I am grieved for you, O wise friend, that you cannot put in your own contemptuous disclaimer of such puritannical pleas as are set up for you; but each creature and Levite must do after his kind.

Yet do not imagine that I will hurt you in this unseen domain of yours by any Boswellism. Every suffrage you get here is fairly your own. Nobody is coaxed to admire you, and you have won friends whom I should be proud to show you, and honorable women not a few. And cannot you renew and confirm your suggestion touching your appearance in this continent? Ah, if I could give your intimation the binding force of an oracular word! - in a few

months, please God, at most, I shall have wife, house, and home wherewith and wherein to return your former hospitality. And if I could draw my prophet and his prophetess to brighten and immortalize my lodge, and make it the window through which for a summer you should look out on a field which Columbus and Berkeley and Lafayette did not scorn to sow, my sun should shine clearer and life would promise something better than peace. There is a part of ethics, or in Schleiermacher's distribution it might be physics, which possesses all attraction for me; to wit, the compensations of the Universe, the equality and the coexistence of action and reaction, that all prayers are granted, that every debt is paid. And the skill with which

Philosophy in Boston

the great all maketh clean work as it goes along, leaves no rag, consumes its smoke, will I hope make a chapter in your thesis.

Men live on the

I intimated above that we aspire to have a work on the First Philosophy in Boston. I hope, or wish rather. Those that are forward in it debate upon the name. I doubt not in the least its reception if the material that should fill it existed. Through the thickest understanding will the reason throw itself instantly into relation with the truth that is its object, whenever that appears. But how seldom is the pure loadstone produced! Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds. brink of mysteries and harmonies into which yet they never enter, and with their hand on the door-latch they die outside. Always excepting my wonderful Professor, who among the living has thrown any memorable truths into circulation? So live and rejoice and work, my friend, and God you aid, for the profit of many more than your mortal eyes shall see. Especially seek with recruited and nevertired vision to bring back yet higher and truer report from your Mount of Communion of the Spirit that dwells there and creates all. Have you received a letter from me with a pamphlet sent in December? Fail not, I beg of you, to remember me to Mrs. Carlyle.

Can you not have some Sartors sent? Hilliard, Gray, & Co. are the best publishers in Boston. Or Mr. Rich has connections with Burdett in Boston.

Yours with respect and affection,

R. WALDO EMERSON

Mr. Willis insists on remaining out of Boston, but will do all that he can for his friends

MY

GLENMARY, September 15, 1840

DEAR LONGFELLOW,

I had thought it prob-
I was

able that I should see you here this summer. sorry to get the assurance that you were not to fly from your orbit of east wind. I wanted to have a talk with you. That same east wind, by the way, was the reason I did not see you while I was in Boston; for I devoted one afternoon to a drive to Cambridge, and on heading round from Brookline the pestilent bise met us full on the quarter, and Mrs. Willis declared she could not stand it. So I up helm for my sister's house in Brighton, and we finished the evening over a fire. I confess that I see everything, even my friends, through my bilious spectacles in Boston. I do not enjoy any thing or anybody within its abominable periphery of hills and salt-marshes. Even you seem not what you would at Glenmary; and I prefer Sumner seasick in a head-wind in the English Channel, to Sumner with his rosiest gills and reddest waistcoat in Boston. By the way, how is our agreeable friend; and have the nankeen-trousered Bostonians yet begun to qualify their admiration of him? I consider his advent a kind of experimentum crucis; and if they do turn and abuse him, they will certainly go to perdition for illiberality. There is no excuse for disliking Sumner. He bears his honors so meekly, and is so thoroughly a good fellow, that if they do not send him to Congress and love him forever, I will deny my cradle.

I am going to New York in a week or two, and one of my bringings back will be your Voices of the Night, of which I have only read the extracts in the newspapers. I see perfectly the line you are striking out for a renown,

Not Quite Merchant Enough

and it will succeed. Your severe, chaste, lofty-thoughted style of poetry will live a great deal longer than that which would be more salable and popular now; and if you preferred the money and the hurrah, I should be as sorry as I am to be obliged to do so myself. Still, I think you are not quite merchant enough with your poems after they are written, and about this I talked a great deal with Sumner, who will disgorge for you.

How, and what fashion of Benedick, is Felton? Him I should like to see too, on an unprejudiced potato-hill, — out of Boston, that is to say; and next year, if I am here, I will try what persuasion will do to get him and his wife, you and Sumner and Cleveland, at Glenmary in literary congress. I have built a new slice to my house, and have plenty of room for you all. Will you, seriously, talk of this and try to shape it out? Tell Felton I was highly gratified and obliged by the kind and flattering review of my poems in the North American. It has done me, I doubt not, great service; ça veut dire I can make better bargains with editors and publishers, - about all I think worth minding in the way of popular opinion. Will you write me a long letter and tell me what you think of your own literary position, and whether a blast from "Under the Bridge" would make your topsails belly? I will express all the admiration I feel for your sweet poems, if you care a rush for it, - indeed, I think I shall do it whether you like it or no. God bless you, dear Longfellow !

Believe me

Yours very faithfully,

N. P. WILLIS

Margaret Fuller urges Henry Thoreau to renewed

effort

18th October, 1841

Do not find the poem on the mountains improved by mere compression, though it might be by fusion and glow. Its merits to me are, a noble recognition of Nature, two or three manly thoughts, and, in one place, a plaintive music. The image of the ships does not please me originally. It illustrates the greater by the less, and affects me as when Byron compares the light on Jura to that of the dark eye of a woman. I cannot define my position here, and a large class of readers would differ from me. As the poet goes on to

"Unhewn primeval timber,

For knees so stiff, for masts so limber,"

he seems to chase an image, already rather forced, into conceits.

Yet, now that I have some knowledge of the man, it seems there is no objection I could make to his lines (with the exception of such offenses against taste as the lines about the humors of the eye, as to which we are already agreed), which I would not make to himself. He is healthful, rare, of open eye, ready hand, and noble scope. He sets no limits to his life, nor to the invasions of nature; he is not wilfully pragmatical, cautious, ascetic, or fantastical. But he is as yet a somewhat bare hill, which the warm gales of Spring have not yet visited. Thought lies too detached, truth is seen too much in detail; we can number and mark the substances imbedded in the rock. Thus his verses are startling as much as stern; the thought does not excuse its conscious existence by letting us see its relation with life; there is a want of fluent music. Yet what could a companion do at present, unless to tame the