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Carlyle’s article on Scott published in the _London and
Westminster Review,_ No. 12.   Reprinted in his _Critical and
Miscellaneous Essays._
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Miss Martineau charges me to send kind remembrances to you and your Lady:  her words were kinder than I have room for here.—­Can you not, in defect or delay of Letter, send me a Massachusetts Newspaper?  I think it costs little or almost nothing now; and I shall know your hand.

XX.  Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 9 February, 1838

My Dear Friend,—­It is ten days now—­ten cold days—­that your last letter has kept my heart warm, and I have not been able to write before.  I have just finished—­Wednesday evening—­a course of lectures which I ambitiously baptized “Human Culture,” and read once a week to the curious in Boston.  I could write nothing else the while, for weariness of the week’s stated scribbling.  Now I am free as a wood-bird, and can take up the pen without fretting or fear.  Your letter should, and nearly did, make me jump for joy,—­fine things about our poor speech at Cambridge,—­ fine things from CARLYLE.  Scarcely could we maintain a decorous gravity on the occasion.  And then news of a friend, who is also Carlyle’s friend.  What has life better to offer than such tidings?  You may suppose I went directly and got me Blackwood, and read the prose and the verse of John Sterling, and saw that my man had a head and a heart, and spent an hour or two very happily in spelling his biography out of his own hand;—­a species of palmistry in which I have a perfect reliance.  I found many incidents grave and gay and beautiful, and have determined to love him very much.  In this romancing of the gentle affections we are children evermore.  We forget the age of life, the barriers so thin yet so adamantean of space and circumstance; and I have had the rarest poems self-singing in my head of brave men that work and conspire in a perfect intelligence across seas and conditions—­and meet at last.  I heartily pray that the Sea and its vineyards may cheer with warm medicinal breath a Voyager so kind and noble.

For the Oration, I am so elated with your goodwill that I begin to fear your heart has betrayed your head this time, and so the praise is not good on Parnassus but only in friendship.  I sent it diffidently (I did send it through bookselling Munroe) to you, and was not a little surprised by your generous commendations.  Yet here it interested young men a good deal for an academical performance, and an edition of five hundred was disposed of in a month.  A new edition is now printing, and I will send you some copies presently to give to anybody who you think will read.