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* The excellent Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, whose romance of
Philothea was published in this year, 1835.

  “If her heart at high floods swamps her brain now and then,
  ’T is but richer for that when the tide ebbs agen.”

says Lowell, in his Fable for Critics.
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The three tasks were, a literary address; a historical discourse on the two-hundredth anniversary of our little town of Concord* (my first adventure in print, which I shall send you); the third, my marriage, now happily consummated.  All three, from the least to the greatest, trod so fast upon each other’s heel as to leave me, who am a slow and awkward workman, no interstice big enough for a letter that should hope to convey any information.  Again I waited that the Discourse might go in his new jacket to show how busy I had been, but the creeping country press has not dressed it yet.  Now congratulate me, my friend, as indeed you have already done, that I live with my wife in my own house, waiting on the good future.  The house is not large, but convenient and very elastic.  The more hearts (specially great hearts) it holds, the better it looks and feels.  I have not had so much leisure yet but that the fact of having ample space to spread my books and blotted paper is still gratifying.  So know now that your rooms in America wait for you, and that my wife is making ready a closet for Mrs. Carlyle.

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* “A Historical Discourse, delivered before the Citizens of
Concord, 12th September, 1835, on the Second Centennial
Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Town.   By Ralph Waldo
Emerson.   Published by Request.   Concord:   G.F.  Bemis, Printer.
1835.”  8vo, pp. 52.—­A discourse worthy of the author and of the
town.   It is reprinted in the eleventh volume of Emerson’s Works,
Boston, 1883.
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I could cry at the disaster that has befallen you in the loss of the book.  My brother Charles says the only thing the friend could do on such an occasion was to shoot himself, and wishes to know if he have done so.  Such mischance might well quicken one’s curiosity to know what Oversight there is of us, and I greet you well upon your faith and the resolution issuing out of it.  You have certainly found a right manly consolation, and can afford to faint and rest a month or two on the laurels of such endeavor.  I trust ere this you have re-collected the entire creation out of the secret cells where, under the smiles of every Muse, it first took life.  Believe, when you are weary, that you who stimulate and rejoice virtuous young men do not write a line in vain.  And whatever betide us in the inexorable future, what is better than to have awaked in many men the sweet sense of beauty, and to double the courage of virtue.  So do not, as you will not, let the imps from all the fens of weariness and apathy have a minute too much.  To die of feeding the fires of others were sweet, since it were not death but multiplication.  And yet I hold to a more orthodox immortality too.