I have written to Mr. Milnes who sent me by Sumner a copy of his article with a note.  I addressed my letter to him at “London,”—­ no more.  Will it ever reach him?  I told him that if I should print more he would find me worse than ever with my rash, unwhipped generalization.  For my journals, which I dot here at home day by day, are full of disjointed dreams, audacities, unsystematic irresponsible lampoons of systems, and all manner of rambling reveries, the poor drupes and berries I find in my basket after endless and aimless rambles in woods and pastures.  I ask constantly of all men whether life may not be poetic as well as stupid?

I shall try and persuade Mr. Calvert, who has sent to me for a letter to you, to find room in his trunk for a poor lithograph portrait of our Concord “Battle-field,” so called, and village, that you may see the faint effigy of the fields and houses in which we walk and love you.  The view includes my Grandfather’s house (under the trees near the Monument), in which I lived for a time until I married and bought my present house, which is not in the scope of this drawing.  I will roll up two of them, and, as Sterling seems to be more nomadic than you, I beg you will send him also this particle of foreign parts.

With this, or presently after it, I shall send a copy of the Dial. It is not yet much; indeed, though no copy has come to me, I know it is far short of what it should be, for they have suffered puffs and dulness to creep in for the sake of the complement of pages; but it is better than anything we had; and I have some poetry communicated to me for the next number which I wish Sterling and Milnes to see.  In this number what say you to the Elegy written by a youth who grew up in this town and lives near me,—­Henry Thoreau?  A criticism on Persius is his also.  From the papers of my brother Charles, I gave them the fragments on Homer, Shakespeare, Burke:  and my brother Edward wrote the little Farewell, when last he left his home.  The Address of the Editors to the Readers is all the prose that is mine, and whether they have printed a few verses for me I do not know.  I am daily expecting an account for you from Little and Brown.  They promised it at this time.  It will speedily follow this sheet, if it do not accompany it.  But I am determined, if I can, to send one letter which is not on business.  Send me some word of the Lectures.  I have yet seen only the initial notices.  Surely you will send me some time the D’Orsay portrait.  Sumner thinks Mrs. Carlyle was very well when he saw her last, which makes me glad.—­I wish you both to love me, as I am affectionately Yours,

—­R.W.  Emerson

LV.  Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 2 July, 1840