and these again corroborated, reinforced, and sworn to by a member of that extraordinary college-class to which it is the good fortune of my friend the Professor to belong, who, though he has formerly been a member of Congress, is, I believe, fully worthy of confidence.  The tree “girts” eighteen and a half feet, and spreads over a hundred, and is a real beauty.  I hope to meet my friend under its branches yet; if we don’t have “youth at the prow,” we will have “pleasure at the ’elm.”

And just now, again, I have got a letter about some grand willows in Maine, and another about an elm in Wayland, but too late for anything but thanks.

[And this leads me to say, that I have received a great many communications, in prose and verse, since I began printing these notes.  The last came this very morning, in the shape of a neat and brief poem, from New Orleans.  I could not make any of them public, though sometimes requested to do so.  Some of them have given me great pleasure, and encouraged me to believe I had friends whose faces I had never seen.  If you are pleased with anything a writer says, and doubt whether to tell him of it, do not hesitate; a pleasant word is a cordial to one, who perhaps thinks he is tiring you, and so becomes tired himself.  I purr very loud over a good, honest letter that says pretty things to me.]

——­Sometimes very young persons send communications, which they want forwarded to editors; and these young persons do not always seem to have right conceptions of these same editors, and of the public, and of themselves.  Here is a letter I wrote to one of these young folks, but, on the whole, thought it best not to send.  It is not fair to single out one for such sharp advice, where there are hundreds that are in need of it.

Dear Sir,—­You seem to be somewhat, but not a great deal, wiser than I was at your age.  I don’t wish to be understood as saying too much, for I think, without committing myself to any opinion on my present state, that I was not a Solomon at that stage of development.

You long to “leap at a single bound into celebrity.”  Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.  Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else,—­very rarely to those who say to themselves, “Go to, now, let us be a celebrated individual!” The struggle for fame, as such, commonly ends in notoriety;—­that ladder is easy to climb, but it leads to pillory which is crowded with fools who could not hold their tongues and rogues who could not hide their tricks.

If you have the consciousness of genius, do something to show it.  The world is pretty quick, nowadays, to catch the flavor of true originality; if you write anything remarkable, the magazines and newspapers will find you out, as the school-boys find out where the ripe apples and pears are.  Produce anything really good, and an intelligent editor will jump at it.  Don’t flatter yourself that any article