Dear Emerson,—­My answer on this occasion has been delayed above two weeks by a rigorous, searching investigation into the procedure of the hapless Book-conveyer, Kennet, in reference to that copy of the Miscellanies. I was deceived by hopes of a conclusive response from day to day; not till yesterday did any come.  My first step, taken long ago, was to address a new copy of the Book, not to you, luckless man, but to Lydia Emerson, the fortunate wife; this copy Green now has lying by him, waiting for the January Steamer (we sail only once a month in this season); before the New Year has got out of infancy the Lady will be graciously pleased to make a few inches of room on her bookshelves for this celebrated performance.  And now as to Kennet, take the brief outcome of some dozen visitations, judicial interrogatories, searches of documents, and other piercing work on the part of methodic Fraser, attended with demurrers, pleadings, false denials, false affirmings, on the part of innocent chaotic Kennet:  namely, that the said Kennet, so urged, did in the end of the last week, fish up from his repositories your very identical Book directed to Munroe’s care, duly booked and engaged for, in May last, but left to repose itself in the Covent-Garden crypts ever since without disturbance from gods or men!  Fraser has brought back the Book, and you have lost it;—­and the Library of my native village in Scotland is to get it; and not Kennet any more in this world, but Green ever henceforth is to be our Book Carrier.  There is a history.  Green, it seems, addresses also to Munroe; but the thing, I suppose, will now shift for itself without watching.

As to the bibliopolic Accounts, my Friend! we will trust them, with a faith known only in the purer ages of Roman Catholicism,—­ when Papacy had indeed become a Dubiety, but was not yet a Quackery and Falsehood, was a thing as true as it could manage to be!  That really may be the fact of this too.  In any case what signifies it much?  Money were still useful; but it is not now so indispensable.  Booksellers by their knavery or their fidelity cannot kill us or cure us.  Of the truth of Waldo Emerson’s heart to me, there is, God be thanked for it, no doubt at all.

My Hero-Lectures lie still in Manuscript.  Fraser offers no amount of cash adequate to be an outward motive; and inwardly there is as yet none altogether clear, though I rather feel of late as if it were clearing.  To fly in the teeth of English Puseyism, and risk such shrill welcome as I am pretty sure of, is questionable:  yet at bottom why not?  Dost thou not as entirely reject this new Distraction of a Puseyism as man can reject a thing,—­and couldst utterly abjure it, and even abhor it,—­were the shadow of a cobweb ever likely to become momentous, the cobweb itself being beheaded, with axe and block on Tower Hill, two centuries ago?  I think it were as well to tell Puseyism that