“It was just before the time of which I am speaking [that of Emerson’s marriage] that the ‘Sartor Resartus’ appeared in ‘Fraser.’  Emerson lent the numbers, or the collected sheets of ‘Fraser,’ to Miss Jackson, and we all had the reading of them.  The excitement which the book caused among young persons interested in the literature of the day at that time you probably remember.  I was quite carried away by it, and so anxious to own a copy, that I determined to publish an American edition.  I consulted James Munroe & Co. on the subject.  Munroe advised me to obtain a subscription to a sufficient number of copies to secure the cost of the publication.  This, with the aid of some friends, particularly of my classmate, William Silsbee, I readily succeeded in doing.  When this was accomplished, I wrote to Emerson, who up to this time had taken no part in the enterprise, asking him to write a preface. (This is the Preface which appears in the American edition, James Munroe & Co., 1836.  It was omitted in the third American from the second London edition,[1] by the same publishers, 1840.) Before the first edition appeared, and after the subscription had been secured, Munroe & Co. offered to assume the whole responsibility of the publication, and to this I assented.

    [Footnote 1:  Revised and corrected by the author.]

“This American edition of 1836 was the first appearance of the ‘Sartor’ in either country, as a distinct edition.  Some copies of the sheets from ‘Fraser,’ it appears, were stitched together and sent to a few persons, but Carlyle could find no English publisher willing to take the responsibility of printing the book.  This shows, I think, how much more interest was taken in Carlyle’s writings in this country than in England.”

On the 14th of May, 1834, Emerson wrote to Carlyle the first letter of that correspondence which has since been given to the world under the careful editorship of Mr. Charles Norton.  This correspondence lasted from the date mentioned to the 2d of April, 1872, when Carlyle wrote his last letter to Emerson.  The two writers reveal themselves as being in strong sympathy with each other, in spite of a radical difference of temperament and entirely opposite views of life.  The hatred of unreality was uppermost with Carlyle; the love of what is real and genuine with Emerson.  Those old moralists, the weeping and the laughing philosophers, find their counterparts in every thinking community.  Carlyle did not weep, but he scolded; Emerson did not laugh, but in his gravest moments there was a smile waiting for the cloud to pass from his forehead.  The Duet they chanted was a Miserere with a Te Deum for its Antiphon; a De Profundis answered by a Sursum Corda.  “The ground of my existence is black as death,” says Carlyle.  “Come and live with me a year,” says Emerson, “and if you do not like New England well enough to stay, one of these years; (when the ‘History’ has passed its ten editions, and been translated into as many languages) I will come and dwell with you.”