send me, I pray you, that short chapter which hovers yet in the limbo of contingency, in solid letters and points.  Let it be, if that is readiest, a criticism on the Dial, and this too Elysian race, not blood, and yet not ichor.—­Let Jane Carlyle be on my part, and, watchful of his hours, urge the poet in the golden one.  I think to send you a duplicate of the last number of the Dial by Mr. Mann,* who with his bride (sister of the above-mentioned Miss Peabody) is going to London and so to Prussia.  He is little known to me, but greatly valued as a philanthropist in this State.  I must go to work a little more methodically this summer, and let something grow to a tree in my wide straggling shrubbery.  With your letters came a letter from Sterling, who was too noble to allude to his books and manuscript sent hither, and which Russell all this time has delayed to print; I know not why, but discouraged, I suppose, in these times by booksellers.  I must know precisely, and write presently to J.S.

Farewell. 
   R.W.  Emerson**

-----------
* The late Horace Mann.

** The following passages from Emerson’s Diary relating to Past and Present seem to have been written a few days after the preceding letter:—­“How many things this book of Carlyle gives us to think!  It is a brave grappling with the problem of the times, no luxurious holding aloof, as is the custom of men of letters, who are usually bachelors and not husbands in the state, but Literature here has thrown off his gown and descended into the open lists.  The gods are come among us in the likeness of men.  An honest Iliad of English woes.  Who is he that can trust himself in the fray?  Only such as cannot be familiarized, but nearest seen and touched is not seen and touched, but remains inviolate, inaccessible, because a higher interest, the politics of a higher sphere, bring him here and environ him, as the Ambassador carries his country with him.  Love protects him from profanation.  What a book this in its relation to English privileged estates!  How shall Queen Victoria read this? how the Primate and Bishops of England? how the Lords? how the Colleges? how the rich? and how the poor?  Here is a book as full of treason as an egg is full of meat, and every lord and lordship and high form and ceremony of English conservatism tossed like a football into the air, and kept in the air with merciless rebounds and kicks, and yet not a word in the book is punishable by statute.  The wit has eluded all official zeal, and yet these dire jokes, these cunning thrusts,—­this flaming sword of cherubim waved high in air illuminates the whole horizon and shows to the eyes of the Universe every wound it inflicts.  Worst of all for the party attacked, it bereaves them beforehand of all sympathy by anticipating the plea of poetic and humane conservation and impressing the reader with the conviction that Carlyle himself has the truest love for everything old and excellent, and a genuine respect for the basis of truth in those whom he exposes.  Gulliver among the Lilliputians...