My Dear Carlyle,--The sight of Mr. Samuel Laurence, the day
before yesterday, in New York, and of your head among his
sketches, set me on thinking which had some pain where should be
only cheer. For Mr. Laurence I hailed his arrival, on every
account. I wish to see a good man whom you prize; and I like to
have good Englishmen come to America, which, of all countries,
after their own, has the best claim to them. He promises to come
and see me, and has begun most propitiously in New York. For
you,--I have too much constitutional regard and ---, not to feel
remorse for my short-comings and slow-comings, and I remember the
maxim which the French stole from our Indians,--and it was worth
stealing,--"Let not the grass grow on the path of friendship."
Ah! my brave giant, you can never understand the silence and
forbearances of such as are not giants. To those to whom we owe
affection, let us be dumb until we are strong, though we should
never be strong. I hate mumped and measled lovers. I hate cramp
in all men,--most in myself.
And yet I should have been pushed to write without Samuel
Laurence; for I lately looked into _Jesuitism,_ a Latter-Day
Pamphlet, and found why you like those papers so well. I think
you have cleared your skirts; it is a pretty good minority of
one, enunciating with brilliant malice what shall be the
universal opinion of the next edition of mankind. And the sanity
was so manifest, that I felt that the over-gods had cleared their
skirts also to this generation, in not leaving themselves without
witness, though without this single voice perhaps I should not
acquit them. Also I pardon the world that reads the book as
though it read it not, when I see your inveterated humors. It
required courage and required conditions that feuilletonists are
not the persons to name or qualify, this writing Rabelais in
1850. And to do this alone.--You must even pitch your tune to
suit yourself. We must let Arctic Navigators and deepsea divers
wear what astonishing coats, and eat what meats--wheat or whale--
they like, without criticism.
I read further, sidewise and backwards, in these pamphlets,
without exhausting them. I have not ceased to think of the great
warm heart that sends them forth, and which I, with others,
sometimes tag with satire, and with not being warm enough for
this poor world;--I too,--though I know its meltings to-me-ward.
Then I learned that the newspapers had announced the death of
your mother (which I heard of casually on the Rock River,
Illinois), and that you and your brother John had been with her
in Scotland. I remembered what you had once and again said of
her to me, and your apprehensions of the event which has come. I
can well believe you were grieved. The best son is not enough a
son. My mother died in my house in November, who had lived with
me all my life, and kept her heart and mind clear, and her own,
until the end. It is very necessary that we should have
mothers,--we that read and write,--to keep us from becoming
paper. I had found that age did not make that she should die
without causing me pain. In my journeying lately, when I think
of home the heart is taken out.
Miss Bacon wrote me in joyful fulness of the cordial kindness and
aid she had found at your hands, and at your wife's; and I have
never thanked you, and much less acknowledged her copious
letter,--copious with desired details. Clough, too, wrote about
you, and I have not written to him since his return to England.
You will see how total is my ossification. Meantime I have
nothing to tell you that can explain this mild palsy. I worked
for a time on my English Notes with a view of printing, but was
forced to leave them to go read some lectures in Philadelphia and
some Western towns. I went out Northwest to great countries
which I had not visited before; rode one day, fault of broken
railroads, in a sleigh, sixty-five miles through the snow, by
Lake Michigan, (seeing how prairies and oak-openings look in
winter,) to reach Milwaukee; "the world there was done up in
large lots," as a settler told me. The farmer, as he is now a
colonist and has drawn from his local necessities great doses of
energy, is interesting, and makes the heroic age for Wisconsin.
He lives on venison and quails. I was made much of, as the only
man of the pen within five hundred miles, and by rarity worth
more than venison and quails.
Greeley of the _New York Tribune_ is the right spiritual father
of all this region; he prints and disperses one hundred and ten
thousand newspapers in one day,--multitudes of them in these very
parts. He had preceded me, by a few days, and people had flocked
together, coming thirty and forty miles to hear him speak; as
was right, for he does all their thinking and theory for them,
for two dollars a year. Other than Colonists, I saw no man.
"There are no singing birds in the prairie," I truly heard. All
the life of the land and water had distilled no thought. Younger
and better, I had no doubt been tormented to read and speak their
sense for them. Now I only gazed at them and their boundless land.
One good word closed your letter in September, which ought to
have had an instant reply, namely, that you might come westward
when Frederic was disposed of. Speed Frederic, then, for all
reasons and for this! America is growing furiously, town and
state; new Kansas, new Nebraska looming up in these days,
vicious politicians seething a wretched destiny for them already
at Washington. The politicians shall be sodden, the States
escape, please God! The fight of slave and freeman drawing
nearer, the question is sharply, whether slavery or whether
freedom shall be abolished. Come and see. Wealth, which is
always interesting, for from wealth power refuses to be divorced,
is on a new scale. Californian quartz mountains dumped down in
New York to be repiled architecturally along shore from Canada to
Cuba, and thence west to California again. John Bull interests
you at home, and is all your subject. Come and see the
Jonathanization of John. What, you scorn all this? Well, then,
come and see a few good people, impossible to be seen on any
other shore, who heartily and always greet you. There is a very
serious welcome for you here. And I too shall wake from sleep.
My wife entreats that an invitation shall go from her to you.
Faithfully yours,
R.W. Emerson