My Dear Carlyle,--You must always thank me for silence, be it
never so long, and must put on it the most generous
interpretations. For I am too sure of your genius and goodness,
and too glad that they shine steadily for all, to importune you
to make assurance sure by a private beam very often. There is
very little in this village to be said to you, and, with all my
love of your letters, I think it the kind part to defend you from
our imbecilities,--my own, and other men's. Besides, my eyes are
bad, and prone to mutiny at any hint of white paper.
And yet I owe you all my story, if story I have. I have been
something of a traveler the last year, and went down the Ohio
River to its mouth; walked nine miles into, and nine miles out
of the Mammoth Cave, in Kentucky,--walked or sailed, for we
crossed small underground streams,--and lost one day's light;
then steamed up the Mississippi, five days, to Galena. In the
Upper Mississippi, you are always in a lake with many islands.
"The Far West" is the right name for these verdant deserts. On
all the shores, interminable silent forest. If you land, there
is prairie behind prairie, forest behind forest, sites of
nations, no nations. The raw bullion of nature; what we call
"moral" value not yet stamped on it. But in a thousand miles the
immense material values will show twenty or fifty Californias;
that a good ciphering head will make one where he is. Thus at
Pittsburg, on the Ohio, the "Iron" City, whither, from want of
railroads, few Yankees have penetrated, every acre of land has
three or four bottoms; first of rich soil; then nine feet of
bituminous coal; a little lower, fourteen feet of coal; then
iron, or salt; salt springs, with a valuable oil called
petroleum floating on their surface. Yet this acre sells for the
price of any tillage acre in Massachusetts; and, in a year, the
railroads will reach it, east and west.--I came home by the great
Northern Lakes and Niagara.
No books, a few lectures, each winter, I write and read. In the
spring, the abomination of our Fugitive Slave Bill drove me to
some writing and speech-making, without hope of effect, but to
clear my own skirts. I am sorry I did not print whilst it was
yet time. I am now told that the time will come again, more's
the pity. Now I am trying to make a sort of memoir of Margaret
Fuller, or my part in one;--for Channing and Ward are to do
theirs. Without either beauty or genius, she had a certain
wealth and generosity of nature which have left a kind of claim
on our consciences to build her a cairn. And this reminds me
that I am to write a note to Mazzini on this matter; and, as you
say you see him, you must charge yourself with delivering it.
What we do must be ended by October. You too are working for
Sterling. It is right and kind. I learned so much from the New
York _Tribune,_ and, a few days after, was on the point of
writing to you, provoked by a foolish paragraph which appeared in
Rufus Griswold's Journal, (New York,) purporting that R.W.E.
possessed important letters of Sterling, without which Thomas
Carlyle could not write the Life. What scrap of hearsay about
contents of Sterling's letters to me, or that I had letters, this
paltry journalist swelled into this puff-ball, I know not. He
once came to my house, and, since that time, may have known
Margaret Fuller in New York; but probably never saw any letter
of Sterling's or heard the contents of any. I have not read
again Sterling's letters, which I keep as good Lares in a special
niche, but I have no recollection of anything that would be
valuable to you. For the American Public for the Book, I think
it important that you should take the precise step of sending
Phillips and Sampson the early copy, and at the earliest. I saw
them, and also E.P. Clark, and put them in communication, and
Clark is to write you at once.
Having got so far in my writing to you, I do not know but I shall
gain heart, and write more letters over sea. You will think my
sloth suicidal enough. So many men as I learned to value in your
country,--so many as offered me opportunities of intercourse,--
and I lose them all by silence. Arthur Helps is a chief
benefactor of mine. I wrote him a letter by Ward,--who brought
the letter back. I ought to thank John Carlyle, not only for me,
but for a multitude of good men and women here who read his
_Inferno_ duly. W.E. Forster sent me his Penn Pamphlet; I sent
it to Bancroft, who liked it well, only he thought Forster might
have made a still stronger case. Clough I prize at a high rate,
the man and his poetry, but write not. Wilkinson I thought a man
of prodigious talent, who somehow held it and so taught others to
hold it cheap, as we do one of those bushel-basket memories which
school-boys and school-girls often show,--and we stop their
mouths lest they be troublesome with their alarming profusion.
But there is no need of beginning to count the long catalogue.
Kindest, kindest remembrance to my benefactress, also in your
house, and health and strength and victory to you.
Your affectionate,
Waldo Emerson