My Dear Sir,--I am glad of the opportunity of Mr. Barnard's*
visit to say health and peace be with you. I esteem it the best
sign that has shone in my little section of space for many days,
that some thirty or more intelligent persons understand and
highly appreciate the _Sartor._ Dr. Channing sent to me for it
the other day, and I have since heard that he had read it with
great interest. As soon as I go into town I shall see him and
measure his love. I know his genius does not and cannot engage
your attention much. He possesses the mysterious endowment of
natural eloquence, whose effect, however intense, is limited, of
course, to personal communication. I can see myself that his
writings, without his voice, may be meagre and feeble. But
please love his catholicism, that at his age can relish the
_Sartor,_ born and inveterated as he is in old books. Moreover,
he lay awake all night, he told my friend last week, because he
had learned in the evening that some young men proposed to issue
a journal, to be called _The Transcendentalist,_ as the organ of
a spiritual philosophy. So much for our gossip of today.
---------
* Mr. Henry Barnard, of Hartford, Connecticut, to whom Emerson
had given a note of introduction to Carlyle.
---------
But my errand is yet to tell. Some friends here are very
desirous that Mr. Fraser should send out to a bookseller here
fifty or a hundred copies of the _Sartor._ So many we want very
much; they would be sold at once. If we knew that two or three
hundred would be taken up, we should reprint it now. But we
think it better to satisfy the known inquirers for the book
first, and when they have extended the demand for it, then to
reproduce it, a naturalized Yankee. The lovers of Teufelsdrockh
here are sufficiently enthusiastic. I am an icicle to them.
They think England must be blind and deaf if the Professor makes
no more impression there than yet appears. I, with the most
affectionate wishes for Thomas Carlyle's fame, am mainly bent on
securing the medicinal virtues of his book for my young
neighbors. The good people think he overpraises Goethe. There I
give him up to their wrath. But I bid them mark his unsleeping
moral sentiment; that every other moralist occasionally nods,
becomes complaisant and traditional; but this man is without
interval on the side of equity and humanity! I am grieved for
you, O wise friend, that you cannot put in your own contemptuous
disclaimer of such puritanical pleas as are set up for you; but
each creature and Levite must do after his kind.
Yet do not imagine that I will hurt you in this unseen domain of
yours by any Boswellism. Every suffrage you get here is fairly
your own. Nobody is coaxed to admire you, and you have won
friends whom I should be proud to show you, and honorable women
not a few. And cannot you renew and confirm your suggestion
touching your appearance in this continent? Ah, if I could give
your intimation the binding force of an oracular word!--in a few
months, please God, at most, I shall have wife, house, and home
wherewith and wherein to return your former hospitality. And if
I could draw my prophet and his prophetess to brighten and
immortalize my lodge, and make it the window through which for a
summer you should look out on a field which Columbus and Berkeley
and Lafayette did not scorn to sow, my sun should shine clearer
and life would promise something better than peace. There is a
part of ethics, or in Schleiermacher's distribution it might be
physics, which possesses all attraction for me; to wit, the
compensations of the Universe, the equality and the coexistence
of action and reaction, that all prayers are granted, that every
debt is paid. And the skill with which the great All maketh
clean work as it goes along, leaves no rag, consumes its smoke,--
will I hope make a chapter in your thesis.
I intimated above that we aspire to have a work on the First
Philosophy in Boston. I hope, or wish rather. Those that are
forward in it debate upon the name. I doubt not in the least its
reception if the material that should fill it existed. Through
the thickest understanding will the reason throw itself instantly
into relation with the truth that is its object, whenever that
appears. But how seldom is the pure loadstone produced! Faith
and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds: Men live on
the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which yet they never
enter, and with their hand on the door-latch they die outside.
Always excepting my wonderful Professor, who among the living has
thrown any memorable truths into circulation? So live and
rejoice and work, my friend, and God you aid, for the profit of
many more than your mortal eyes shall see. Especially seek with
recruited and never-tired vision to bring back yet higher and
truer report from your Mount of Communion of the Spirit that
dwells there and creates all. Have you received a letter from me
with a pamphlet sent in December? Fail not, I beg of you, to
remember me to Mrs. Carlyle.
Can you not have some _Sartors_ sent? Hilliard, Gray, & Co. are
the best publishers in Boston. Or Mr. Rich has connections with
Burdett in Boston.
Yours with respect and affection,
R. Waldo Emerson