December 9, 1853.
All news from your side is very acceptable; political, personal, and first-personal. I do a little Plutarch continually; only a very little, I fear; but it always brings up some vision of the Common, or Shady Hill, or the Appian Way, or the road across from your gate towards Allen and Farnham’s. Things go on slowly and rather dismally here in the December fog.
Tell Child not to be too learned about his Chaucer, for my sake; and, above all, to make the verses scan. I hesitate about recommending any indications of the metre in the typography. But a set of simple directions, emphatically and prominently given at the outset (e.g. for the sounding or silencing of the final e), will, I think, be essential. People won’t read Chaucer against their ears.
There is a curious notion afloat among the German extreme Radicals, that Russia is more hopeful than feudal Western Europe; that the life of the Russian commune is pure democracy; and except that every member is bound to the soil, and cannot quit it except by placing himself under the quasi-ownership of a seigneur, I believe there is some truth in the statement. However, I don’t think we can afford to try.
Carlyle has, like Emerson, just lost his mother; like her, I should think, rather a remarkable woman. He left the Ashburtons’ house in Hampshire just after I got there, to go and see her at Ecclefechan, in Annandale.
Will you tell me, please, what is the amount of rate for schools in Boston and Cambridge? I am right, am I not, in telling people that children of colour attend the schools at Cambridge, but not at Boston?
For a scrap of news—
Over-worked, over-hurried,
Over-Crokered, over-Murrayed.
Such was the monody uttered over himself by the invalided ex-editor of the ‘Quarterly,’ on retiring for an Italian seclusion.