is a dreadful weariness; I directed him, accordingly, to my last painter, one Laurence, a man of real parts, whom I wished Gambardella to know,—­and whom I wished to know Gambardella withal, that he might tell me whether there was any probability of a good picture by him in case one did decide on encountering the weariness.  Well:  Gambardella returns with a magnanimous report that Laurence’s picture far transcends any capability of his; that whoever in America or elsewhere will have a likeness of the said individual must apply to Laurence, not to Gambardella,—­which latter artist heroically throws down his brush, and says, Be it far from me!  The brave Gambardella! if I can get him this night to dilate a little farther on his Visit to the Community of Shakers, and the things he saw and felt there, it will be a most true benefit to me.  Inextinguishable laughter seemed to me to lie in Gambardella’s vision of that Phenomenon,—­ the sight and the seer, but we broke out too loud all at once, and he was afraid to continue.—­Alas! there is almost no laughter going in the world at present.  True laughter is as rare as any other truth,—­the sham of it frequent and detestable, like all other shams.  I know nothing wholesomer; but it is rarer even than Christmas, which comes but once a year, and does always come once.

Your satisfactions and reflections at sight of your English Book are such as I too am very thankful for.  I understand them well.  May worse guest never visit the Drawing-room at Concord than that bound Book.  Tell the good Wife to rejoice in it:  she has all the pleasure;—­to her poor Husband it will be increase of pain withal:  nay, let us call it increase of valiant labor and endeavor; no evil for a man, if he be fit for it!  A man must learn to digest praise too, and not be poisoned with it:  some of it is wholesome to the system under certain circumstances; the most of it a healthy system will learn by and by to throw into the slop-basin, harmlessly, without any trial to digest it.  A thinker, I take it, in the long run finds that essentially he must ever be and continue alone;—­alone: “silent, rest over him the stars, and under him the graves”!  The clatter of the world, be it a friendly, be it a hostile world, shall not intermeddle with him much.  The Book of Essays, however, does decidedly “speak to England,” in its way, in these months; and even makes what one may call a kind of appropriate “sensation” here.  Reviews of it are many, in all notes of the gamut;—­of small value mostly; as you might see by the two Newspaper specimens I sent you. (Did you get those two Newspapers?) The worst enemy admits that there are piercing radiances of perverse insight in it; the highest friends, some few, go to a very high point indeed.  Newspapers are busy with extracts;—­much complaining that it is “abstruse,” neological, hard to get the meaning of.  All which is very proper.