Ever yours,
       R.W.  Emerson

LXXXIX.  Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 31 January, 1844

Dear Emerson, Some ten days ago came your Letter with a new Draft of L32 and odd money in it:  all safe; the Draft now gone into the City to ripen into gold and silver, the Letter to be acknowledged by some hasty response now and here.  America, I say to myself looking at these money drafts, is a strange place; the highest comes out of it and the lowest!  Sydney Smith is singing dolefully about doleful American repudiation, “disowning of the soft impeachment”; and here on the other hand is an American man, in virtue of whom America has become definable withal as a place from which fall heavenly manna-showers upon certain men, at certain seasons of history, when perhaps manna-showers were not the unneedfulest things!—­We will take the good and the evil, here as elsewhere, and heartily bless Heaven.

But now for the Draft at the top of this leaf.  One Colman,* a kind of Agricultural Missionary, much in vogue here at present, has given it me; it is Emerson’s, the net produce hitherto (all but two cents) of Emerson’s Essays. I enclose farther the Bookseller’s hieroglyph papers; unintelligible as all such are; but sent over to you for scrutiny by the expert.  I gather only that there are some Five Hundred and odd of the dear-priced edition sold, some Two Hundred and odd still to sell, which the Bookseller says are (in spite of pirates) slowly selling; and that the half profit upon the whole adventure up to this date has been L24 15s. 11d. sterling,—­equal, as I am taught, at $4.88 per pound sterling, to $121.02, for which, all but the cents, here is a draft on Boston, payable at sight.  Pray have yourself straightway paid; that if there be any mistake or delay I may rectify it while time yet is.—­I add, for the intelligence of the Bookseller-Papers, that Fraser, with whom the bargain originally stood, was succeeded by Nickerson; these are the names of the parties.  And so, dear Friend; accept this munificent sum of Money; and expect a blessing with it if good wishes from the heart of man can give one.  So much for that.

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* The Reverend Henry Colman.
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Did you receive a Dumfries Newspaper with a criticism in it?  The author is one Gilfillan, a young Dissenting Minister in Dundee; a person of great talent, ingenuousness, enthusiasm, and other virtues; whose position as a Preacher of bare old Calvinism under penalty of death sometimes makes me tremble for him.  He has written in that same Newspaper about all the notablest men of his time; Godwin, Corn-law Elliott and I know not all whom:  if he publish the Book, I will take care to send it you.* I saw the man for the first time last autumn, at Dumfries; as I said, his being a Calvinist Dissenting Minister, economically fixed, and spiritually with such germinations in him, forces me to be very reserved to him.