--------
* This letter appeared in the Athenaeum, for July 22, 1882
--------

I am here on a visit to my brother, who is a lawyer in this city, and lives at Staten Island, at a distance of half an hour’s sail.  The city has such immense natural advantages and such capabilities of boundless growth, and such varied and ever increasing accommodations and appliances for eye and ear, for memory and wit, for locomotion and lavation, and all manner of delectation, that I see that the poor fellows that live here do get some compensation for the sale of their souls.  And how they multiply!  They estimate the population today at 350,000, and forty years ago, it is said, there were but 20,000.  But I always seem to suffer some loss of faith on entering cities.  They are great conspiracies; the parties are all maskers, who have taken mutual oaths of silence not to betray each other’s secret and each to keep the other’s madness in countenance.  You can scarce drive any craft here that does not seem a subornation of the treason.  I believe in the spade and an acre of good ground.  Whoso cuts a straight path to his own bread, by the help of God in the sun and rain and sprouting of the grain, seems to me an universal workman.  He solves the problem of life, not for one, but for all men of sound body.  I wish I may one day send you word, or, better, show you the fact, that I live by my hands without loss of memory or of hope.  And yet I am of such a puny constitution, as far as concerns bodily labor, that perhaps I never shall.  We will see.

Did I tell you that we hope shortly to send you some American verses and prose of good intent?  My vivacious friend Margaret Fuller is to edit a journal whose first number she promises for the 1st of July next, which I think will be written with a good will if written at all.  I saw some poetical fragments which charmed me,—­if only the writer consents to give them to the public.

I believe I have yet little to tell you of myself.  I ended in the middle of February my ten lectures on the Present Age.  They are attended by four hundred and fifty to five hundred people, and the young people are so attentive; and out of the hall ask me so many questions, that I assume all the airs of Age and Sapience.  I am very happy in the sympathy and society of from six to a dozen persons, who teach me to hope and expect everything from my countrymen.  We shall have many Richmonds in the field presently.  I turn my face homeward to-morrow, and this summer I mean to resume my endeavor to make some presentable book of Essays out of my mountain of manuscript, were it only for the sake of clearance.  I left my wife, and boy, and girl,—­the softest, gracefulest little maiden alive, creeping like a turtle with head erect all about the house,—­well at home a week ago.  The boy has two deep blue wells for eyes, into which I gladly peer when I am tired.  Ellen, they say, has no such depth of orb, but I believe I love her better than ever I did the boy.  I brought my mother with me here to spend the summer with William Emerson and his wife and ruddy boy of four years.  All these persons love and honour you in proportion to their knowledge and years.