How my sheet is filling with dull talk about mere economics! I must still add that the Lecturing I talked of, last time, is verily over now; and well over. The superfine people listened to the rough utterance with patience, with favor, increasing to the last. I sent you a Newspaper once, to indicate that it was in progress. I know not yet what the money result is; but I suppose it will enable us to exist here thriftily another year; not without hope of at worst doing the like again when the time comes. It is a great novelty in my lot; felt as a very considerable blessing; and really it has arrived, if it have arrived, in due time, for I had begun to get quite impatient of the other method. Poverty and Youth may do; Poverty and Age go badly together.—For the rest, I feel fretted to fiddle-strings; my head and heart all heated, sick,—ah me! The question as ever is: Rest. But then where? My Brother invites us to come to Rome for the winter; my poor sick Wife might perhaps profit by it; as for me, Natty Leatherstocking's lodge in the Western Wood, I think, were welcomer still. I have a great mind, too, to run off and see my Mother, by the new railways. What we shall do, whether not stay quietly here, must remain uncertain for a week or two. Write you always hither, till you hear otherwise.
The Orations were right welcome; my Madeira one, returned thence with Sterling, was circulating over the West of England. Sterling and Harriet stretched out the right hand with wreathed smiles. I have read, a second or third time. Robert Southey has got a copy, for his own behoof and that of _Lake_land: if he keep his word as to me, he may do as much for you, or more. Copies are at Cambridge; among the Oxonians too; I have with stingy discretion distributed all my copies but two. Old Rogers, a grim old Dilettante, full of sardonic sense, was heard saying, "It is German Poetry given out in American Prose." Friend Emerson ought to be content;—and has now above all things, as I said, to be in no haste. Slow fire does make sweet malt: how true, how true! Also his next work ought to be a concrete thing; not theory any longer, but deed. Let him "live it," as he says; that is the way to come to "painting of it." Geometry and the art of Design being once well over, take the brush, and andar con Dios!
Mrs. Child has sent me a Book, Philothea, and a most magnanimous epistle. I have answered as I could. The Book is beautiful, but of a hectic beauty; to me not pleasant, even fatal looking. Such things grow not in the ground, on Mother Earth's honest bosom, but in hothouses,—Sentimental-Calvinist fire traceable underneath! Bancroft also is of the hothouse partly: I have a Note to send him by Sumner; do you thank him meanwhile, and say nothing about hothouses! But, on the whole, men ought in New England, too to "swallow their formulas";* there is no freedom till then: yet hitherto I find only one man there who seems fairly on the way towards that, or arrived at that. Good speed to him. I had to send my Wife's love: she is not dangerously ill; but always feeble, and has to struggle to keep erect; the summer always improves her, and this summer too. Adieu, dear Friend; may Good always be with you and yours.
—T. Carlyle
—————- * This was the saying of the old Marquis de Mirabeau concerning his son, Il a hume toutes les formules, and is used as a text by Carlyle in his article on Mirabeau. "Of inexpressible advantage is it that a man have 'an eye instead of a pair of spectacles merely'; that, seeing through the formulas of things and even 'making away' with many a formula, he see into the thing itself, and so know it and be master of it!" —————
XXV. Emerson to Carlyle
Boston, 30 July, 1838
My Dear Sir,—I am in town today to get what money the booksellers will relinquish from their faithful gripe, and have succeeded now in obtaining a first instalment, however small. I enclose to you a bill of exchange for fifty pounds sterling, which costs here exactly $242.22, the rate of exchange being nine percent. I shall not today trouble you with any account, for my letter must be quickly ready to go by the steam-packet. An exact account has been rendered to me, which, though its present balance in our favor is less than I expected, yet, as far as I understand it, agrees well with all that has been promised: at least the balance in our favor when the edition is sold, which the booksellers assure me will assuredly be done within a year from the publication, must be seven hundred and sixty dollars, and what more Heaven and the subscribers may grant. I shall follow this letter and bill by a duplicate of the bill in the next packet.
The Miscellanies is published in two volumes, a copy of which goes to you immediately. Munroe tells me that two hundred and fifty copies of it are already sold. Writing in a bookshop, my dear friend, I have no power to say aught than that I am heartily and always,
Yours,
R. Waldo Emerson