I have with stingy discretion distributed all my copies but two.  Old Rogers, a grim old Dilettante, full of sardonic sense, was heard saying, “It is German Poetry given out in American Prose.”  Friend Emerson ought to be content;—­and has now above all things, as I said, to be in no haste. Slow fire does make sweet malt:  how true, how true!  Also his next work ought to be a concrete thing; not theory any longer, but deed. Let him “live it,” as he says; that is the way to come to “painting of it.”  Geometry and the art of Design being once well over, take the brush, and andar con Dios!

Mrs. Child has sent me a Book, Philothea, and a most magnanimous epistle.  I have answered as I could.  The Book is beautiful, but of a hectic beauty; to me not pleasant, even fatal looking.  Such things grow not in the ground, on Mother Earth’s honest bosom, but in hothouses,—­Sentimental-Calvinist fire traceable underneath!  Bancroft also is of the hothouse partly:  I have a Note to send him by Sumner; do you thank him meanwhile, and say nothing about hothouses! But, on the whole, men ought in New England, too to “swallow their formulas";* there is no freedom till then:  yet hitherto I find only one man there who seems fairly on the way towards that, or arrived at that.  Good speed to him. I had to send my Wife’s love:  she is not dangerously ill; but always feeble, and has to struggle to keep erect; the summer always improves her, and this summer too.  Adieu, dear Friend; may Good always be with you and yours.

—­T.  Carlyle

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* This was the saying of the old Marquis de Mirabeau concerning
his son, Il a hume toutes les formules, and is used as a text
by Carlyle in his article on Mirabeau.   “Of inexpressible
advantage is it that a man have ’an eye instead of a pair of
spectacles merely’;  that, seeing through the formulas of things
and even ‘making away’ with many a formula, he see into the thing
itself, and so know it and be master of it!”
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XXV.  Emerson to Carlyle

Boston, 30 July, 1888

My Dear Sir,—­I am in town today to get what money the booksellers will relinquish from their faithful gripe, and have succeeded now in obtaining a first instalment, however small.  I enclose to you a bill of exchange for fifty pounds sterling, which costs here exactly $242.22, the rate of exchange being nine percent.  I shall not today trouble you with any account, for my letter must be quickly ready to go by the steam-packet.  An exact account has been rendered to me, which, though its present balance in our favor is less than I expected, yet, as far as I understand it, agrees well with all that has been promised:  at least the balance in our favor when the edition is sold, which the booksellers assure me will assuredly be done within a year from the publication, must be seven hundred and sixty dollars, and what more Heaven and the subscribers may grant.  I shall follow this letter and bill by a duplicate of the bill in the next packet.