If your Photograph succeed as well as mine, I shall be almost tragically glad of it.  This of me is far beyond all pictures; really very like:  I got Laurence the Painter to go with me, and he would not let the people off till they had actually made a likeness.  My Wife has got another, which she asserts to be much “more amiable-looking,” and even liker!* O my Friend, it is a strange Phantasmagory of a Fact, this huge, tremendous World of ours, Life of ours!  Do you bethink you of Craigenputtock, and the still evening there?  I could burst into tears, if I had that habit:  but it is of no use.  The Cromwell business will be ended about the end of May,—­I do hope!

You say not a word of your own affairs:  I have vaguely been taught to look for some Book shortly;—­what of it?  We are well, or tolerably well, and the summer is come:  adieu.  Blessings on you and yours.

—­T.C.

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* The engraved portrait in the first volume of this
Correspondence is from a photograph taken from this daguerrotype.
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CX.  Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 14 May, 1846

Dear Friend,—­I daily expect the picture, and wonder—­so long as I have wished it—­I had never asked it before.  I was in Boston the other day, and went to the best reputed Daguerreotypist, but though I brought home three transcripts of my face, the house-mates voted them rueful, supremely ridiculous.  I must sit again; or, as true Elizabeth Hoar said, I must not sit again, not being of the right complexion which Daguerre and iodine delight in.  I am minded to try once more, and if the sun will not take me, I must sit to a good crayon sketcher, Mr. Cheney, and send you his draught....

Good rides to you and the longest escapes from London streets.  I too have a new plaything, the best I ever had,—­a wood-lot.  Last fall I bought a piece of more than forty acres, on the border of a little lake half a mile wide and more, called Walden Pond,—­a place to which my feet have for years been accustomed to bring me once or twice a week at all seasons.  My lot to be sure is on the further side of the water, not so familiar to me as the nearer shore.  Some of the wood is an old growth, but most of it has been cut off within twenty years and is growing thriftily.  In these May days, when maples, poplars, oaks, birches, walnut, and pine are in their spring glory, I go thither every afternoon, and cut with my hatchet an Indian path through the thicket all along the bold shore, and open the finest pictures.