STATEN ISLAND, June 8, 1843.
DEAR FRIEND,--I have been to see Henry James, and like him very much.
It was a great pleasure to meet him. It makes humanity seem more erect
and respectable. I never was more kindly and faithfully catechised. It
made me respect myself more to be thought worthy of such wise
questions. He is a man, and takes his own way, or stands still in his
own place. I know of no one so patient and determined to have the good
of you. It is almost friendship, such plain and human dealing. I think
that he will not write or speak inspiringly; but he is a refreshing,
forward-looking and forward-moving man, and he has naturalized and
humanized New York for me. He actually reproaches you by his respect
for your poor words. I had three hours' solid talk with him, and he
asks me to make free use of his house. He wants an expression of your
faith, or to be sure that it is faith, and confesses that his own
treads fast upon the neck of his understanding. He exclaimed, at some
careless answer of mine: "Well, you Transcendentalists are wonderfully
consistent. I must get hold of this somehow!" He likes Carlyle's
book,[25] but says that it leaves him in an excited and unprofitable
state, and that Carlyle is so ready to obey his humor that he makes
the least vestige of truth the foundation of any superstructure, not
keeping faith with his better genius nor truest readers.
I met Wright on the stairs of the Society Library, and W. H. Channing
and Brisbane on the steps. The former (Channing) is a concave man, and
you see by his attitude and the lines of his face that he is
retreating from himself and from yourself, with sad doubts. It is like
a fair mask swaying from the drooping boughs of some tree whose stem
is not seen. He would break with a conchoidal fracture. You feel as if
you would like to see him when he has made up his mind to run all the
risks. To be sure, he doubts because he has a great hope to be
disappointed, but he makes the possible disappointment of too much
consequence. Brisbane, with whom I did not converse, did not impress
me favorably. He looks like a man who has lived in a cellar, far gone
in consumption. I barely saw him, but he did not look as if he could
let Fourier go, in any case, and throw up his hat. But I need not have
come to New York to write this.
I have seen Tappan for two or three hours, and like both him and
Waldo; but I always see those of whom I have heard well with a slight
disappointment. They are so much better than the great herd, and yet
the heavens are not shivered into diamonds over their heads. Persons
and things flit so rapidly through my brain nowadays that I can hardly
remember them. They seem to be lying in the stream, stemming the tide,
ready to go to sea, as steamboats when they leave the dock go off in
the opposite direction first, until they are headed right, and then
begins the steady revolution of the paddle-wheels; and _they_ are not
quite cheerily headed anywhither yet, nor singing amid the shrouds as
they bound over the billows. There is a certain youthfulness and
generosity about them, very attractive; and Tappan's more reserved and
solitary thought commands respect.
After some ado, I discovered the residence of Mrs. Black, but there
was palmed off on me, in her stead, a Mrs. Grey (quite an inferior
color), who told me at last that she was not Mrs. Black, but her
mother, and was just as glad to see me as Mrs. Black would have been,
and so, forsooth, would answer just as well. Mrs. Black had gone with
Edward Palmer to New Jersey, and would return on the morrow.
I don't like the city better, the more I see it, but worse. I am
ashamed of my eyes that behold it. It is a thousand times meaner than
I could have imagined. It will be something to hate,--that's the
advantage it will be to me; and even the best people in it are a part
of it, and talk coolly about it. The pigs in the street are the most
respectable part of the population. When will the world learn that a
million men are of no importance compared with _one_ man? But I must
wait for a shower of shillings, or at least a slight dew or mizzling
of sixpences, before I explore New York very far.
The sea-beach is the best thing I have seen. It is very solitary and
remote, and you only remember New York occasionally. The distances,
too, along the shore, and inland in sight of it, are unaccountably
great and startling. The sea seems very near from the hills, but it
proves a long way over the plain, and yet you may be wet with the
spray before you can believe that you are there. The far seems near,
and the near far. Many rods from the beach, I step aside for the
Atlantic, and I see men drag up their boats on to the sand, with oxen,
stepping about amid the surf, as if it were possible they might draw
up Sandy Hook.
I do not feel myself especially serviceable to the good people with
whom I live, except as inflictions are sanctified to the righteous.
And so, too, must I serve the boy. I can look to the Latin and
mathematics sharply, and for the rest behave myself. But I cannot be
in his neighborhood hereafter as his Educator, of course, but as the
hawks fly over my own head. I am not attracted toward him but as to
youth generally. He shall frequent me, however, as much as he can, and
I'll be I.
Bradbury[26] told me, when I passed through Boston, that he was
coming to New York the following Saturday, and would then settle with
me, but he has not made his appearance yet. Will you, the next time
you go to Boston, present that order for me which I left with you?
If I say less about Waldo and Tappan now, it is, perhaps, because I
may have more to say by and by. Remember me to your mother and Mrs.
Emerson, who, I hope, is quite well. I shall be very glad to hear from
her, as well as from you. I have very hastily written out something
for the _Dial_, and send it only because you are expecting
something,--though something better. It seems idle and Howittish, but
it may be of more worth in Concord, where it belongs. In great haste.
Farewell.