My Dear Emerson,—­Surely I am a sinful man to neglect so long making any acknowledgment of the benevolent and beneficent Arithmetic you sent me!  It is many weeks, perhaps it is months, since the worthy citizen—­your Host as I understood you in some of your Northern States—­stept in here, one mild evening, with his mild honest face and manners; presented me your Bookseller Accounts; talked for half an hour, and then went his way into France.  Much has come and gone since then; Letters of yours, beautiful Disciples of yours:—­I pray you forgive me!  I have been lecturing; I have been sick; I have been beaten about in all ways.  Nay, at bottom, it was only three days ago that I got the Bibliopoliana back from Fraser; to whom, as you recommended, I, totally inadequate like yourself to understand such things, had straightway handed them for examination.  I always put off writing till Fraser should have spoken.  I did not urge him, or he would have spoken any day:  there is my sin.

Fraser declares the Accounts to be made out in the most beautiful manner; intelligible to any human capacity; correct so far as he sees, and promising to yield by and by a beautiful return of money.  A precious crop, which we must not cut in the blade; mere time will ripen it into yellow nutritive ears yet.  So he thinks.  The only point on which I heard him make any criticism was on what he called, if I remember, “the number of Copies delivered,”—­that is to say, delivered by the Printer and Binder as actually available for sale.  The edition being of a Thousand, there have only 984 come bodily forth; 16 are “waste.”  Our Printers, it appears, are in the habit of adding one for every fifty beforehand, whereby the waste is usually made good, and more; so that in One Thousand there will usually be some dozen called “Author’s copies” over and above.  Fraser supposes your Printers have a different custom.  That is all.  The rest is apparently every-way right; is to be received with faith; with faith, charity, and even hope,—­and packed into the bottom of one’s drawer, never to be looked at more except on the outside, as a memorial of one of the best and helpfulest of men!  In that capacity it shall lie there.

My Lectures were in May, about Great Men. The misery of it was hardly equal to that of former years, yet still was very hateful.  I had got to a certain feeling of superiority over my audience; as if I had something to tell them, and would tell it them.  At times I felt as if I could, in the end, learn to speak.  The beautiful people listened with boundless tolerance, eager attention.  I meant to tell them, among other things, that man was still alive, Nature not dead or like to die; that all true men continued true to this hour,—­Odin himself true, and the Grand Lama of Thibet himself not wholly a lie.  The Lecture on Mahomet ("the Hero as Prophet”) astonished my worthy friends