I am allowed the privilege of printing the following letter addressed to a lady of high intellectual gifts, who was one of the earliest, most devoted, and most faithful of his intimate friends:—­

CONCORD, May 13, 1859.

Please, dear C., not to embark for home until I have despatched these lines, which I will hasten to finish.  Louis Napoleon will not bayonet you the while,—­keep him at the door.  So long I have promised to write! so long I have thanked your long suffering!  I have let pass the unreturning opportunity your visit to Germany gave to acquaint you with Gisela von Arnim (Bettina’s daughter), and Joachim the violinist, and Hermann Grimm the scholar, her friends.  Neither has E.,—­wandering in Europe with hope of meeting you,—­yet met.  This contumacy of mine I shall regret as long as I live.  How palsy creeps over us, with gossamer first, and ropes afterwards! and the witch has the prisoner when once she has put her eye on him, as securely as after the bolts are drawn.—­Yet I and all my little company watch every token from you, and coax Mrs. H. to read us letters.  I learned with satisfaction that you did not like Germany.  Where then did Goethe find his lovers?  Do all the women have bad noses and bad mouths?  And will you stop in England, and bring home the author of “Counterparts” with you?  Or did——­write the novels and send them to London, as I fancied when I read them?  How strange that you and I alone to this day should have his secret!  I think our people will never allow genius, without it is alloyed by talent.  But——­is paralyzed by his whims, that I have ceased to hope from him.  I could wish your experience of your friends were more animating than mine, and that there were any horoscope you could not cast from the first day.  The faults of youth are never shed, no, nor the merits, and creeping time convinces ever the more of our impotence, and of the irresistibility of our bias.  Still this is only science, and must remain science.  Our praxis is never altered for that.  We must forever hold our companions responsible, or they are not companions but stall-fed.

I think, as we grow older, we decrease as individuals, and as if in an immense audience who hear stirring music, none essays to offer a new stave, but we only join emphatically in the chorus.  We volunteer no opinion, we despair of guiding people, but are confirmed in our perception that Nature is all right, and that we have a good understanding with it.  We must shine to a few brothers, as palms or pines or roses among common weeds, not from greater absolute value, but from a more convenient nature.  But ’tis almost chemistry at last, though a meta-chemistry.  I remember you were such an impatient blasphemer, however musically, against the adamantine identities, in your youth, that you should take your turn of resignation now, and be a preacher of peace.  But there is a little raising of the eyebrow, now and then, in the most passive acceptance,—­if of an intellectual