But what do I read in our Boston Newspapers twice in the last three days?  That “Thomas Carlyle is coming to America,” and the tidings cordially greeted by the editors; though I had just received your letter silent to any such point.  Make that story true, though it had never a verisimilitude since thirty odd years ago, and you shall make many souls happy and perhaps show you so many needs and opportunities for beneficent power that you cannot be allowed to grow old or withdraw.  Was I not once promised a visit?  This house entreats you earnestly and lovingly to come and dwell in it.  My wife and Ellen and Edward E. are thoroughly acquainted with your greatness and your loveliness.  And it is but ten days of healthy sea to pass.

So wishes heartily and affectionately,
                                 R.W.  Emerson

CLXXXV.  Carlyle to Emerson

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 28 September, 1870

Dear Emerson,—­Your Letter, dated 15 June, never got to me till about ten days ago; when my little Niece and I returned out of Scotland, and a long, rather empty Visit there!  It had missed me here only by two or three days; and my highly infelicitous Selectress of Letters to be forwarded had left it carefully aside as undeserving that honor,—­good faithful old Woman, one hopes she is greatly stronger on some sides than in this literary-selective one.  Certainly no Letter was forwarded that had the hundredth part of the right to be so; certainly, of all the Letters that came to me, or were left waiting here, this was, in comparison, the one which might not with propriety have been left to lie stranded forever, or to wander on the winds forever!—­

One of my first journeys was to Chapman, with vehement rebuke of this inconceivable “Cincinnati-Massachusetts” business. Stupiditas stupiditatum; I never in my life, not even in that unpunctual House, fell in with anything that equaled it.  Instant amendment was at once undertaken for, nay it seems had been already in part performed:  “Ten volumes, following the nine you already had, were despatched in Field & Co.’s box above two months ago,” so Chapman solemnly said and asseverated to me; so that by this time you ought actually to have in hand nineteen volumes; and the twentieth (first of Friedrich), which came out ten days ago, is to go in Field & Co.’s Box this week, and ought, not many days after the arrival of this Letter, to be in Boston waiting for you there.  The Chapman’s Homer (two volumes) had gone with that first Field Packet; and would be handed to you along with the ten volumes which were overdue.  All this was solemnly declared to me as on Affidavit; Chapman also took extract of the Massachusetts passage in your Letter, in order to pour it like ice-cold water on the head of his stupid old Chief-Clerk, the instant the poor creature got