CONCORD, February 27, 1839.

MY DEAR SIR,—­I am very sorry to have made you wait so long for an answer to your flattering request for two such little poems.  You are quite welcome to the lines “To the Rhodora;” but I think they need the superscription ["Lines on being asked ‘Whence is the Flower?’"].  Of the other verses ["Good-by proud world,” etc] I send you a corrected copy, but I wonder so much at your wishing to print them that I think you must read them once again with your critical spectacles before they go further.  They were written sixteen years ago, when I kept school in Boston, and lived in a corner of Roxbury called Canterbury.  They have a slight misanthropy, a shade deeper than belongs to me; and as it seems nowadays I am a philosopher and am grown to have opinions, I think they must have an apologetic date, though I well know that poetry that needs a date is no poetry, and so you will wiselier suppress them.  I heartily wish I had any verses which with a clear mind I could send you in lieu of these juvenilities.  It is strange, seeing the delight we take in verses, that we can so seldom write them, and so are not ashamed to lay up old ones, say sixteen years, instead of improvising them as freely as the wind blows, whenever we and our brothers are attuned to music.  I have heard of a citizen who made an annual joke.  I believe I have in April or May an annual poetic conatus rather than afflatus, experimenting to the length of thirty lines or so, if I may judge from the dates of the rhythmical scraps I detect among my MSS.  I look upon this incontinence as merely the redundancy of a susceptibility to poetry which makes all the bards my daily treasures, and I can well run the risk of being ridiculous once a year for the benefit of happy reading all the other days.  In regard to the Providence Discourse, I have no copy of it; and as far as I remember its contents, I have since used whatever is striking in it; but I will get the MS., if Margaret Fuller has it, and you shall have it if it will pass muster.  I shall certainly avail myself of the good order you gave me for twelve copies of the “Carlyle Miscellanies,” so soon as they appear.  He, T.C., writes in excellent spirits of his American friends and readers....  A new book, he writes, is growing in him, though not to begin until his spring lectures are over (which begin in May).  Your sister Sarah was kind enough to carry me the other day to see some pencil sketches done by Stuart Newton when in the Insane Hospital.  They seemed to me to betray the richest invention, so rich as almost to say, why draw any line since you can draw all?  Genius has given you the freedom of the universe, why then come within any walls?  And this seems to be the old moral which we draw from our fable, read it how or where you will, that we cannot make one good stroke until we can make every possible stroke; and when we can one, every one seems superfluous.  I heartily thank you