I am so glad to find myself speaking once more to you, that I mean to persist in the practice.  Be as glad as you have been.  You and I shall not know each other on this platform as long as we have known.  A correspondence even of twenty-five years should not be disused unless through some fatal event.  Life is too short, and, with all our poetry and morals, too indigent to allow such sacrifices.  Eyes so old and wary, and which have learned to look on so much, are gathering an hourly harvest,—­and I cannot spare what on noble terms is offered me.

With congratulations to Jane Carlyle on the grandeur of the Book,

Yours affectionately,
                     R.W.  Emerson

Extract From Diary*

Here has come into the country, three or four months ago, a History of Frederick, infinitely the wittiest book that ever was written,—­a book that one would think the English people would rise up in mass and thank the author for, by cordial acclamation, and signify, by crowning him with oakleaves, their joy that such a head existed among them, and sympathizing and much-reading America would make a new treaty or send a Minister Extraordinary to offer congratulation of honoring delight to England, in acknowledgment of this donation,—­a book holding so many memorable and heroic facts, working directly on practice; with new heroes, things unvoiced before;—­the German Plutarch (now that we have exhausted the Greek and Roman and British Plutarchs), with a range, too, of thought and wisdom so large and so elastic, not so much applying as inosculating to every need and sensibility of man, that we do not read a stereotype page, rather we see the eyes of the writer looking into ours, mark his behavior, humming, chuckling, with under-tones and trumpet-tones and shrugs, and long-commanding glances, stereoscoping every figure that passes, and every hill, river, road, hummock, and pebble in the long perspective.  With its wonderful new system of mnemonics, whereby great and insignificant men are ineffaceably ticketed and marked and modeled in memory by what they were, had, and did; and withal a book that is a Judgment Day, for its moral verdict on the men and nations and manners of modern times.

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* In the first edition, this extract was printed from the
original Diary;  it is now printed according to the copy
sent abroad.
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And this book makes no noise; I have hardly seen a notice of it in any newspaper or journal, and you would think there was no such book.  I am not aware that Mr. Buchanan has sent a special messenger to Great Cheyne Row, Chelsea, or that Mr. Dallas has been instructed to assure Mr. Carlyle of his distinguished consideration.  But the secret wits and hearts of men take note of it, not the less surely.  They have said nothing lately in praise of the air, or of fire, or of the blessing of love, and yet, I suppose, they are sensible of these, and not less of this book, which is like these.