My Dear Friend,--Yesterday I had your letter of March. It
quickens my purpose (always all but ripe) to write to you. If it
had come earlier I should have been confirmed in my original
purpose of publishing _Select Miscellanies of T.C._ As it is, we
are far on in the printing of the first two volumes (to make 900
pages) of the papers as they stand in your list. And now I find
we shall only get as far as the seventeenth or eighteenth
article. I regret it, because this book will not embrace those
papers I chiefly desire to provide people with, and it may be
some time, in these years of bankruptcy and famine, before we
shall think it prudent to publish two volumes more. But Loring
is a good man, and thinks that many desire to see the sources of
Nile. I, for my part, fancy that to meet the taste of the
readers we should publish _from the last_ backwards, beginning
with the paper on Scott, which has had the best reception ever
known. Carlyleism is becoming so fashionable that the most
austere Seniors are glad to qualify their reprobation by
applauding this review. I have agreed with the bookseller
publishing the _Miscellanies_ that he is to guarantee to you one
dollar on every copy he sells; and you are to have the total
profit on every copy subscribed for. The retail price [is] to be
$2.50. The cost of the work is not yet precisely ascertained.
The work will probably appear in six or seven weeks. We print
one thousand copies. So whenever it is sold you shall have one
thousand dollars.
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* Printed in the _Athenaeum,_ July 8, 1882.
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The _French Revolution_ continues to find friends and purchasers.
It has gone to New Orleans, to Nashville, to Vicksburg. I have
not been in Boston lately, but have determined that nearly or
quite eight hundred copies should be gone. On the 1st of July I
shall make up accounts with the booksellers, and I hope to make
you the most favorable returns. I shall use the advice of
Barnard, Adams, & Co. in regard to remittances.
When you publish your next book I think you must send it out to
me in sheets, and let us print it here contemporaneously with the
English edition. The _eclat_ of so new a book would help the
sale very much.
But a better device would be, that you should embark in the
"Victoria" steamer, and come in a fortnight to New York, and in
twenty-four hours more to Concord. Your study arm-chair,
fireplace, and bed, long vacant, auguring expect you. Then you
shall revise your proofs and dictate wit and learning to the New
World. Think of it in good earnest. In aid of your friendliest
purpose, I will set down some of the facts. I occupy, or
_improve,_ as we Yankees say, two acres only of God's earth; on
which is my house, my kitchen-garden, my orchard of thirty young
trees, my empty barn. My house is now a very good one for
comfort, and abounding in room. Besides my house, I have, I
believe, $22,000, whose income in ordinary years is six percent.
I have no other tithe or glebe except the income of my winter
lectures, which was last winter $800. Well, with this income,
here at home, I am a rich man. I stay at home and go
abroad at my own instance. I have food, warmth, leisure, books,
friends. Go away from home, I am rich no longer. I never have a
dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise man, I suppose, ever was
rich in the sense of _freedom to spend,_ because of the
inundation of claims, so neither am I, who am not wise. But at
home, I am rich,--rich enough for ten brothers. My wife Lidian
is an incarnation of Christianity,--I call her Asia,--and keeps
my philosophy from Antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest,
most conservative of ladies, whose only exception to her
universal preference for old things is her son; my boy, a piece
of love and sunshine, well worth my watching from morning to
night;--these, and three domestic women, who cook and sew and run
for us, make all my household. Here I sit and read and write,
with very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with
the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each
sentence an infinitely repellent particle.
In summer, with the aid of a neighbor, I manage my garden; and a
week ago I set out on the west side of my house forty young pine
trees to protect me or my son from the wind of January. The
ornament of the place is the occasional presence of some ten or
twelve persons, good and wise, who visit us in the course of the
year.--But my story is too long already. God grant that you will
come and bring that blessed wife, whose protracted illness we
heartily grieve to learn, and whom a voyage and my wife's and my
mother's nursing would in less than a twelvemonth restore to
blooming health. My wife sends to her this message: "Come, and
I will be to you a sister." What have you to do with Italy?
Your genius tendeth to the New, to the West. Come and live with
me a year, and if you do not like New England well enough to
stay, one of these years (when the _History_ has passed its ten
editions, and been translated into as many languages) I will come
and dwell with you.
I gladly hear what you say of Sterling. I am foolish enough to
be delighted with being an object of kindness to a man I have
never seen, and who has not seen me. I have not yet got the
_Blackwood_ for March, which I long to see, but the other three
papers I have read with great satisfaction. They lie here on my
table. But he must get well.
As to Miss Martineau, I know not well what to say. Meaning to do
me a signal kindness (and a kindness quite out of all measure of
justice) she does me a great annoyance,--to take away from me my
privacy and thrust me before my time (if ever there be a time)
into the arena of the gladiators to be stared at. I was ashamed
to read, and am ashamed to remember. Yet, as you see her, I
would not be wanting in gratitude to a gifted and generous lady
who so liberally transfigures our demerits. So you shall tell
her, if you please, that I read all her book with pleasure but
that part, and if ever I shall travel West or South, I think she
has furnished me with the eyes. Farewell, dear wise man. I
think your poverty honorable above the common brightness of that
thorn-crown of the great. It earns you the love of men and the
praise of a thousand years. Yet I hope the angelical Beldame,
all-helping, all-hated, has given you her last lessons, and,
finding you so striding a proficient, will dismiss you to a
hundred editions and the adoration of the booksellers.
--R.W. Emerson
I have never heard from Rich, who, you wrote, had sent his
account to me. Let him direct to me at Concord.
A young engineer in Cambridge, by name McKean,* volunteers his
services in correcting the proofs of the _Miscellanies,_--and he
has your errata,--for the love of the reading. Shall we have
anthracite coal or wood in your chamber? My old mother is glad
you are coming.
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* The late Mr. Henry S. McKean, a son of Professor McKean, and a
graduate of Harvard College in 1828.
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