thousand copies were bought up.  The ill wind has blown over.  I advertised, as usual, my winter course of Lectures, and it prospered very well.  Ten Lectures:  I. Doctrine of the Soul; II.  Home; III.  The School; IV.  Love; V. Genius; VI.  The Protest; VII.  Tragedy; VIII.  Comedy; IX.  Duty; X. Demonology.  I designed to add two more, but my lungs played me false with unseasonable inflammation, so I discoursed no more on “Human Life.”  Now I am well again.—­But, as I said, as I could not hurt myself, it was foolish to flatter myself that I could mix your cause with mine and hurt you.  Nothing is more certain than that you shall have all our ears, whenever you wish for them, and free from that partial position which I deprecated.  Yet I cannot regret my letter, which procured me so affectionate and magnanimous a reply.

Thanks, too, for your friendliest invitation.  But I have a new reason why I should not come to England,—­a blessed babe, named Ellen, almost three weeks old,—­a little, fair, soft lump of contented humanity, incessantly sleeping, and with an air of incurious security that says she has come to stay, has come to be loved, which has nothing mean, and quite piques me.

Yet how gladly should I be near you for a time.  The months and years make me more desirous of an unlimited conversation with you; and one day, I think, the God will grant it, after whatever way is best.  I am lately taken with The Onyx Ring, which seemed to me full of knowledge, and good, bold, true drawing.  Very saucy, was it not? in John Sterling to paint Collins; and what intrepid iconoclasm in this new Alcibiades to break in among your Lares and disfigure your sacred Hermes himself in Walsingham.* To me, a profane man, it was good sport to see the Olympic lover of Frederica, Lili, and so forth, lampooned.  And by Alcibiades too, over whom the wrath of Pericles must pause and brood ere it falls.  I delight in this Sterling, but now that I know him better I shall no longer expect him to write to me.  I wish I could talk to you on the grave questions, graver than all literature, which the trifles of each day open.  Our doing seems to be a gaudy screen or popinjay to divert the eye from our nondoing.  I wish, too, you could know my friends here.  A man named Bronson Alcott is a majestic soul, with whom conversation is possible.  He is capable of truth, and gives me the same glad astonishment that he should exist which the world does.

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* Collins and Walsingham, two characters in The Onyx Ring, are
partly drawn, not very felicitously, from Carlyle and Goethe.   In
his Life of Sterling, Carlyle says of the story:   “A tale still
worth reading, in which, among the imaginary characters, various
friends of Sterling’s are shadowed forth not always in the truest
manner.”   It is reprinted in the second volume of Sterling’s
Essays and Tales, edited by Julius Hare.
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As I hear not yet of your reception of the bill of