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:—­

“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.]