Wednesday evening, February 16.
DEAR FRIEND,--I have time to write a few words about the _Dial_. I
have just received the three first signatures, which do not yet
complete Lane's piece. He will place five hundred copies for sale at
Munroe's bookstore. Wheeler has sent you two full sheets--more about
the German universities--and proper names, which will have to be
printed in alphabetical order for convenience; what this one has done,
that one is doing, and the other intends to do. Hammer-Purgstall (Von
Hammer) may be one, for aught I know. However, there are two or three
_things_ in it, as well as names. One of the books of Herodotus is
discovered to be out of place. He says something about having sent
Lowell, by the last steamer, a budget of literary news, which he will
have communicated to you ere this. Mr. Alcott has a letter from
Heraud,[21] and a book written by him,--the Life of Savonarola,--which
he wishes to have republished here. Mr. Lane will write a notice of
it. (The latter says that what is in the New York post-office _may_ be
directed to Mr. Alcott.) Miss [Elizabeth] Peabody has sent a "Notice
to the readers of the _Dial_" which is not good.
Mr. Chapin lectured this evening, and so rhetorically that I forgot my
duty and heard very little. I find myself better than I have been,
and am meditating some other method of paying debts than by lectures
and writing,--which will only do to talk about. If anything of that
"other" sort should come to your ears in New York, will you remember
it for me?
Excuse this scrawl, which I have written over the embers in the
dining-room. I hope that you live on good terms with yourself and the
gods.
Yours in haste, HENRY.
Mr. Lane and his lucubrations proved to be tough subjects, and the
next letter has more to say about them and the _Dial_. Lane had
undertaken to do justice to Mr. Alcott and his books, as may still be
read in the pages of that April number of the Transcendentalist
quarterly.