My Dear Friend,--I have long owed you a letter and have much to
acknowledge. Your two letters containing tidings, the first of
the mortal illness, and the second of the death of Sterling, I
had no heart to answer. I had nothing to say. Alas! as in so
many instances heretofore, I knew not what to think. Life is
somewhat customary and usual; and death is the unusual and
astonishing; it kills in so far the survivor also, when it
ravishes from him friendship and the most noble and admirable
qualities. That which we call faith seems somewhat stoical and
selfish, if we use it as a retreat from the pangs this ravishment
inflicts. I had never seen him, but I held him fast; now I see
him not, but I can no longer hold him. Who can say what he yet
is and will be to me? The most just and generous can best divine
that. I have written in vain to James to visit me, or to send me
tidings. He sent me, without any note, the parcel you confided
to him, and has gone to Albany, or I know not whither.
I have your notes of the progress of my London printing, and, at
last, the book itself. It was thoughtless in me to ask your
attention to the book at all in the proof state; the printer
might have been fully trusted with corrected printed pages before
him. Nor should Chapman have taxed you for an advertisement;
only, I doubt not he was glad of a chance to have business with
you; and, of course, was too thankful for any Preface. Thanks
to you for the kind thought of a "Notice," and for its friendly
wit. You shall not do this thing again, if I should send you any
more books. A Preface from you is a sort of banner or oriflamme,
a little too splendid for my occasion, and misleads. I fancy my
readers to be a very quiet, plain, even obscure class,--men and
women of some religious culture and aspirations, young, or else
mystical, and by no means including the great literary and
fashionable army, which no man can count, who now read your
books. If you introduce me, your readers and the literary papers
try to read me, and with false expectations. I had rather have
fewer readers and only such as belong to me.
I doubt not your stricture on the book as sometimes unconnected
and inconsecutive is just. Your words are very gentle. I should
describe it much more harshly. My knowledge of the defects of
these things I write is all but sufficient to hinder me from
writing at all. I am only a sort of lieutenant here in the
deplorable absence of captains, and write the laws ill as
thinking it a better homage than universal silence. You
Londoners know little of the dignities and duties of country
lyceums. But of what you say now and heretofore respecting the
remoteness of my writing and thinking from real life, though I
hear substantially the same criticism made by my countrymen, I do
not know what it means. If I can at any time express the law and
the ideal right, that should satisfy me without measuring the
divergence from it of the last act of Congress. And though I
sometimes accept a popular call, and preach on Temperance or the
Abolition of Slavery, as lately on the 1st of August, I am sure
to feel, before I have done with it, what an intrusion it is into
another sphere, and so much loss of virtue in my own. Since I am
not to see you from year to year, is there never an Englishman
who knows you well, who comes to America, and whom you can send
to me to answer all my questions? Health and love and joy to you
and yours.
--R.W. Emerson