You ask after Cromwell: ask not of him; he is like to drive me mad.  There he lies, shining clear enough to me, nay glowing, or painfully burning; but far down; sunk under two hundred years of Cant, Oblivion, Unbelief, and Triviality of every kind:  through all which, and to the top of all which, what mortal industry or energy will avail to raise him!  A thousand times I have rued that my poor activity ever took that direction.  The likelihood still is that I may abandon the task undone.  I have bored through the dreariest mountains of rubbish; I have visited Naseby Field, and how many other unintelligible fields and places; I have &c., &c.:—­alas, what a talent have I for getting into the Impossible!  Meanwhile my studies still proceed; I even take a ghoulish kind of pleasure in raking through these old bone-houses and burial-aisles now; I have the strangest fellowship with that huge Genius of DEATH (universal president there), and catch sometimes, through some chink or other, glimpses into blessed ulterior regions,—­blessed, but as yet altogether silent. There is no use of writing of things past, unless they can be made in fact things present:  not yesterday at all, but simply today and what it holds of fulfilment and of promises is ours: the dead ought to bury their dead, ought they not?  In short, I am very unfortunate, and deserve your prayers,—­in a quiet kind of way!  If you lose tidings of me altogether, and never hear of me more,—­consider simply that I have gone to my natal element, that the Mud Nymphs have sucked me in; as they have done several in their time!

Sterling was here about the time your Letters to him came:  your American reprint of his pieces was naturally gratifying him much.* He seems getting yearly more restless; necessitated to find an outlet for himself, unable as yet to do it well.  I think he will now write Review articles for a while; which craft is really, perhaps, the one he is fittest for hitherto.  I love Sterling:  a radiant creature; but very restless;—­incapable either of rest or of effectual motion:  aurora borealis and sheet lightning; which if it could but concentrate itself, as I [say] always—!—­We had much talk; but, on the whole, even his talk is not much better for me than silence at present. Me miserum!

--------
* “The Poetical Works of John Sterling,” Philadelphia, 1842.
--------

Directly about the time of Sterling’s departure came Alcott, some two weeks after I had heard of his arrival on these shores.  He has been twice here, at considerable length; the second time, all night.  He is a genial, innocent, simple-hearted man, of much natural intelligence and goodness, with an air of rusticity, veracity, and dignity withal, which in many ways appeals to one.  The good Alcott:  with his long, lean face and figure, with his gray worn temples and mild radiant eyes; all bent on saving the world by a return to acorns and the golden age; he comes before one like a kind of venerable Don Quixote, whom nobody can even laugh at without loving!....