Only when I see how much work is to be done, what room for a poet—­for any spiritualist—­in this great, intelligent, sensual, and avaricious America, I lament my fumbling fingers and stammering tongue.  I have sometimes fancied I was to catch sympathetic activity from contact with noble persons; that you would come and see me; that I should form stricter habits of love and conversation with some men and women here who are already dear to me,—­and at some rate get off the numb palsy, and feel the new blood sting and tingle in my fingers’ ends.  Well, sure I am that the right word will be spoken though I cut out my tongue.  Thanks, too, to your munificent Fraser for his liberal intention to divide the profits of the Essays. I wish, for the encouragement of such a bookseller, there were to be profits to divide.  But I have no faith in your public for their heed to a mere book like mine.  There are things I should like to say to them, in a lecture-room or in a “steeple house,” if I were there.  Seven hundred and fifty copies!  Ah no!

And so my dear brother has quitted the roaring city, and gone back in peace to his own land,—­not the man he left it, but richer every way, chiefly in the sense of having done something valiantly and well, which the land, and the lands, and all that wide elastic English race in all their dispersion, will know and thank him for.  The holy gifts of nature and solitude be showered upon you!  Do you not believe that the fields and woods have their proper virtue, and that there are good and great things which will not be spoken in the city?  I give you joy in your new and rightful home, and the same greetings to Jane Carlyle! with thanks and hopes and loves to you both.

—­R.W.  Emerson

As usual at this season of the year, I, incorrigible spouting Yankee, am writing an oration to deliver to the boys in one of our little country colleges, nine days hence.* You will say I do not deserve the aid of any Muse.  O but if you knew how natural it is to me to run to these places!  Besides, I always am lured on by the hope of saying something which shall stick by the good boys.  I hope Brown did not fail to find you, with thirty-eight sovereigns (I believe) which he should carry you.

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* “The Method of Nature.   An Address to the Society of the
Adelphi, in Waterville College, Maine, August 11, 1841.”
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LXVIII.  Carlyle to Emerson

Newby, Annan, Scotland, 18 August, 1841

My Dear Emerson,—­Two days ago your Letter, direct from Liverpool, reached me here; only fifteen days after date on the other side of the Ocean:  one of the swiftest messengers that have yet come from you.  Steamers have been known to come, they say, in nine days.  By and by we shall visibly be, what I always say we virtually are, members of neighboring Parishes; paying continual visits to one another.  What is to hinder huge London from