R. WALDO EMERSON.

    CONCORD, MASS., November 25, 1834.

MY DEAR SIR,—­Miss Peabody has kindly sent me your manuscript piece on Goethe and Carlyle.  I have read it with great pleasure and a feeling of gratitude, at the same time with a serious regret that it was not published.  I have forgotten what reason you assigned for not printing it; I cannot think of any sufficient one.  Is it too late now?  Why not change its form a little and annex to it some account of Carlyle’s later pieces, to wit:  “Diderot,” and “Sartor Resartus.”  The last is complete, and he has sent it to me in a stitched pamphlet.  Whilst I see its vices (relatively to the reading public) of style, I cannot but esteem it a noble philosophical poem, reflecting the ideas, institutions, men of this very hour.  And it seems to me that it has so much wit and other secondary graces as must strike a class who would not care for its primary merit, that of being a sincere exhortation to seekers of truth.  If you still retain your interest in his genius (as I see not how you can avoid, having understood it and cooperated with it so truly), you will be glad to know that he values his American readers very highly; that he does not defend this offensive style of his, but calls it questionable tentative; that he is trying other modes, and is about publishing a historical piece called “The Diamond Necklace,” as a part of a great work which he meditates on the subject of the French Revolution.  He says it is part of his creed that history is poetry, could we tell it right.  He adds, moreover, in a letter I have recently received from him, that it has been an odd dream that he might end in the western woods.  Shall we not bid him come, and be Poet and Teacher of a most scattered flock wanting a shepherd?  Or, as I sometimes think, would it not be a new and worse chagrin to become acquainted with the extreme deadness of our community to spiritual influences of the higher kind?  Have you read Sampson Reed’s “Growth of the Mind”?  I rejoice to be contemporary with that man, and cannot wholly despair of the society in which he lives; there must be some oxygen yet, and La Fayette is only just dead.

    Your friend, R. WALDO EMERSON.

    It occurs to me that ’t is unfit to send any white paper so far as
    to your house, so you shall have a sentence from Carlyle’s letter.

[This may be found in Carlyle’s first letter, dated 12th August, 1834.] Dr. Le Baron Russell, an intimate friend of Emerson for the greater part of his life, gives me some particulars with reference to the publication of “Sartor Resartus,” which I will repeat in his own words:—­