Emerson wrote between four and five thousand letters, despite what he called his “chronic & constitutional reluctance to write a letter.” He told his brother Charles that a “few sincere & entire communications are all we can expect in a lifetime. They are that which make the earth memorable to the speakers and perhaps measure the spiritual years.”
The thirty-eight selections here were chosen to show a fairly wide range of Emerson’s correspondence, as a family man and a friend, as a sage and a sophist, as a citizen of Concord and a citizen of the world. Here we see a minister wrestling with the tenets of the Church, a scholar working through the idea of Reason and Understanding, a man twice in love, a father mourning the loss of his young son, a defendant of Bronson Alcott’s ideas, a citizen outraged by the treatment of the Cherokee, and ultimately a man of and about his time, something that can be forgotten amid the Emersonian universalities we often quote.
—J.C.
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January 6 and 9, 1827
Charleston, South Carolina
Dear William,
I received with great joy a letter from you a few days since & suppose that before this time you have received mine, written a fortnight ago & sent by I know not what ship. I believe I recounted in that letter the plagues which had fallen upon me & which appear to have excited your kind curiosity. The cold has been so considerable here as to prevent me from deriving any signal benefit from the change of climate. Indeed I am scared out & tis more than probable that I shall take passage for St. Augustine, where I am promised the most balmy air in the world, in the sloop William next Tuesday or Wednesday. I beseech you however not to be in any particular alarm on my account. I am not sick; I am not well; but luke-sick—and as in my other complaints, so in this, have no symptom that any physician extant can recognize or understand. I have my maladies all to myself. I have but a single complaint,—a certain stricture on the right side of the chest, which always makes itself felt when the air is cold or damp, & the attempt to preach or the like exertion of the lungs is followed by an aching. The worst part of it is the deferring of hopes—& who can help being heart sick? Moreover it makes me dependent inasmuch as my excellent friend in Waltham undertakes to supply me with funds without appointing the pay day. I have books & pens enough here to keep me from being desperately homesick but have not succeeded in overcoming certain physical & metaphysical difficulties sufficiently to accomplish any thing in the way of grave composition, as I had hoped. There are here scarce any materials for “Letters from S. Carolina,” if I were ambitious. . . .
YR AFFECTIONATE BROTHER
WALDO—
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December 24, 1828
Divinity Hall, Cambridge, Massachusetts
My dear brother,
I have the happiness to inform you that I have been now for one week engaged to Ellen Louisa Tucker a young lady who if you will trust my account is the fairest & best of her kind. Not to drive you to skepticism by any extravagances, I will tell you a simple story. She is the youngest daughter of the late Beza Tucker a merchant of Boston of whose children you may remember William Sewall was guardian. When we were at Roxbury they lived in the Sumner house on the Dedham turnpike. The mother has been now three or four years the wife of Col W. A. Kent of Concord, N. H. It is now just a year since I became acquainted with Ellen at that house—but I thought I had got over my blushes & wishes when now I determined to go into that dangerous neighborhood again on Edward’s account. But the presumptuous man was overthrown by the eye & the ear & surrendered at discretion. He is now as happy as it is safe in life to be in the affection of the lady & the approbation of the friends. She is 17 years old, & very beautiful by universal consent. Her feelings are exceedingly delicate & noble—and I only want you to see her. Edward is very highly gratified.
I shall have time soon to say much more upon this matter and am your affectionate
WALDO E.
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January 30, 1829
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Christian brethren & friends,
I have received the communication transmitted to me by your committee inviting me to the office of junior pastor in your church & society. I accept the invitation.
If my own feelings could have been consulted, I should have desired to postpone, at least, for several months, my entrance into this solemn office. I do not now approach it with any sanguine confidence in my abilities, or in my prospects. I come to you in weakness, and not in strength. In a short life, I have yet had abundant experience of the uncertainty of human hopes. I have learned the lesson of my utter dependency; and it is in a devout reliance upon other strength than my own, in a humble trust on God to sustain me, that I put forth my hand to his great work.
But, brethren, whilst I distrust my powers, I must speak firmly of my purposes. I well know what are the claims, on your part, to my best exertions, and I shall meet them, as far as in me lies, by a faithful performance of duty. I shun no labour. I shall do all that I can.
In approaching these duties, I am encouraged by the strong expression of confidence & goodwill, I have received from you. I am encouraged by the hope of enjoying the counsel and aid of the distinguished servant of God who has so long laboured among you. I look to the example of our Lord, in all my hopes of advancing the influence of his holy religion, and I implore the blessing of God upon this connexion to be formed between you and myself.
I AM YOUR AFFECTIONATE FRIEND & SERVANT,
RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
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Tuesday 11 o’clock February 8, 1831
Boston, Massachusetts
Dear Aunt
My angel is gone to heaven this morning & I am alone in the world & strangely happy. Her lungs shall no more be torn nor her head scalded by her blood nor her whole life suffer from the warfare between the force & delicacy of her soul & the weakness of her frame. I said this morn & I do not know but it is true that I have never known a person in the world in whose separate existence as a soul I could so readily & fully believe & she is present with me now beaming joyfully upon me, in her deliverance & the entireness of her love for your poor nephew. I see it plainly that things & duties will look coarse & vulgar enough to me when I find the romance of her presence (& romance is a beggarly word) withdrawn from them all. But now the fulness of joy occasioned by things said by her in the last week & by this eternal deliverance is in my heart. She has a great deal to say always about Aunt Mary & would gladly have seen you when Grandfather came & said then she should like now a letter from you.
But the past days the most eventful of my life are all a dim confusion & now the pall is drawn over them, yet do they shine brilliantly in my spiritual world. Say, dear Aunt, if I am not rich in her memory?
Respectful love to Grandfather & tell him Ellen blessed him for his prayer—of which her lips repeated every word.
YOUR NEPHEW
WALDO E
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September 11, 1832
Boston, Massachusetts
Christian Friends,
In the discourse delivered from the pulpit last Sabbath, I explained the circumstances which have seemed to me to make it my duty to resign my office as your minister. I now request a dismission from the pastoral charge. On this occasion, I cannot help adding a few words.
I am very far from regarding my relation to you with indifference. I am bound to you, as a society, by the experience of uninterrupted kindness; by the feelings of respect & love I entertain for you all, as my tried friends; by ties of personal attachment to many individuals among you, which I account the happiness of my life; by the hope I had entertained of living always with you, and of contributing, if possible, in some small degree, to your welfare.
Nor do I think less of the office of a Christian minister. I am pained at the situation in which I find myself, that compels me to make a difference of opinion of no greater importance, the occasion of surrendering so many & so valuable functions as belong to that office. I have the same respect for the great objects of the Christian ministry, & the same faith in their gradual accomplishment through the use of human means, which, at first, led me to enter it. I should be unfaithful to myself, if any change of circumstances could diminish my devotion to the cause of divine truth.
And so, friends, let me hope, that whilst I resign my official relation to you I shall not lose your kindness, & that a difference of opinion as to the value of an ordinance, will be overlooked by us in our common devotion to what is real & eternal.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
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December 22, 1832
Boston, Massachusetts
CHRISTIAN FRIENDS,—Since the formal resignation of my official relation to you in my communication to the proprietors in September, I had waited anxiously for an opportunity of addressing you once more from the pulpit, though it were only to say, Let us part in peace and in the love of God. The state of my health has prevented and continues to prevent me from so doing. I am now advised to seek the benefit of a sea-voyage. I cannot go away without a brief parting word to friends who have shown me so much kindness, and to whom I have felt myself so dearly bound.
Our connexion has been very short. I had only begun my work. It is now brought to a sudden close, and I look back, I own, with a painful sense of weakness, to the little service I have been able to render, after so much expectation on my part,—to the chequered space of time, which domestic affliction and personal infirmities have made yet shorter and more unprofitable.
As long as he remains in the same place, every man flatters himself, however keen may be his sense of his failures and unworthiness, that he shall yet accomplish much; that the future shall made amends for the past; that his very errors shall prove his instructors,—and what limit is there to hope? But a separation from our place, the close of a particular career of duty, shuts the books, bereaves us of this hope, and leaves us only to lament how little has been done.
Yet, my friends, our faith in the great truths of the New Testament makes the change of places and circumstances, of less account to us, by fixing our attention upon that which is unalterable. I find great consolation in the thought, that the resignation of my present relations makes so little change to myself. I am no longer your minister, but am not the less engaged, I hope, to the love and service of the same external cause, the advancement, namely, of the kingdom of God in the hearts of men. The tie that binds each of us to that cause is not created by our connexion, and can not be hurt by our separation. To me, as one disciple, is the ministry of truth, as far as I can discern and declare it, committed, and I desire to live no where and no longer than that grace of God is imparted to me—the liberty to seek and the liberty to utter it.
And, more than this, I rejoice to believe, that my ceasing to exercise the pastoral office among you, does not make any real change in our spiritual relation to each other. Whatever is most desireable and excellent therein, remains to us. For, truly speaking, whoever provokes me to a good act or thought, has given me a pledge of his fidelity to virtue,—he has come under bonds to adhere to that cause to which we are jointly attached. And so I say to all you, who have been my counsellors and cooperators in our Christian walk, that I am wont to see in your faces, the seals and certificates of our mutual obligations. If we have conspired from week to week, in the sympathy and expression of devout sentiments; if we have received together the unspeakable gift of God’s truth; if we have studied together the sense of any divine word; or striven in any charity; or conferred together for the relief or instruction of any brother; if together we have laid down the dead in pious hope; or held up the babe into the baptism of Christianity; above all if we have shared in any habitual acknowledgment of that benignant God, whose omnipresence raises and glorifies the meanest offices and the lowest ability, and opens heaven in every heart that worships him,—then indeed are we united, we are mutually debtors to each other of faith and hope, engaged to persist and confirm each other’s hearts in obedience to the Gospel. We shall not feel that the nominal changes and little separations of this world, can release us from the strong cordage of this spiritual bond. And I entreat you to consider how truly blessed will have been our connexion, if in this manner, the memory of it shall serve to bind each one of us more strictly to the practice of our several duties.
It remains to thank you for the goodness you have uniformly extended towards me, for your forgiveness of many defects, and your patient and even partial acceptance of every endeavor to serve you; for the liberal provision you have ever made for my maintenance; and for a thousand acts of kindness, which have comforted and assisted me.
To the proprietors, I owe a particular acknowledgment, for their recent generous vote for the continuance of my salary, and hereby ask their leave to relinquish this emolument at the end of the present month.
And now, brethren and friends, having returned into your hands the trust you have honored me with—the charge of public and private instruction in this religious society, I pray God, that whatever seed of truth and virtue we have sown and watered together, may bear fruit unto eternal life. I commend you to the Divine Providence. May He grant you, in your ancient sanctuary, the service of able and faithful teachers. May He multiply to your families and to your persons, every genuine blessing; and whatever discipline may be appointed to you in this world, may the blessed hope of the resurrection, which He has planted in the constitution of the human soul, and confirmed and manifested by Jesus Christ, be made good to you beyond the grave. In this faith and hope, I bid you farewell.
YOUR AFFECTIONATE SERVANT,
RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
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May 31, 1834
Newton, Massachusetts
My dear brother,
Your last letter to mother postpones to a pretty distance our prospect of seeing you but as some of our feet were shod with quicksilver when we came into the world there is still an even chance that you may slip in upon us in some of these revolutions of Night & Morn. Here sit Mother & I among the pine trees still almost as we shall lie by & by under them. Here we sit always learning & never coming to the knowledge of.—The greatest part of my virtue—that mustard seedlet that no man wots of—is Hope. I am ever of good cheer & if the heaven asks no service at my hands am reconciled to my insignificance yet keeping my eye open upon the brave & the beautiful. Philosophy affirms that the outward world is only phenomenal & the whole concern of dinners of tailors of gigs of balls whereof men make such account is a quite relative & temporary one—an intricate dream—the exhalation of the present state of the Soul—wherein the Understanding works incessantly as if it were real but the eternal Reason when now & then he is allowed to speak declares it is an accident a smoke nowise related to his permanent attributes. Now that I have used the words, let me ask you do you draw the distinction of Milton Coleridge & the Germans between Reason & Understanding. I think it a philosophy itself. & like all truth very practical. So now lay away the letter & take up the following dissertation on Sunday. Reason is the highest faculty of the soul—what we mean often by the soul itself; it never reasons, never proves, it simply perceives; it is vision. The Understanding toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues, near sighted but strong-sighted, dwelling in the present the expedient the customary. Beasts have some understanding but no Reason. Reason is potentially perfect in every man—Understanding in very different degrees of strength. The thoughts of youth, & ‘first thoughts,’ are the revelations of Reason. the love of the beautiful & of Goodness as the highest beauty the belief in the absolute & universal superiority of the Right & the True But understanding that wrinkled calculator the steward of our house to whom is committed the support of our animal life contradicts evermore these affirmations of Reason & points at Custom & Interest & persuades one man that the declarations of Reason are false & another that they are at least impracticable. Yet by & by after having denied our Master we come back to see at the end of years or of life that he was the Truth. ‘Tell him,’ was the word sent by Posa to the Spanish prince ‘when he is a man to reverence the dreams of his youth.’ And it is observed that ‘our first & third thoughts usually coincide.’ Religion Poetry Honor belong to the Reason; to the real the absolute. These the Understanding sticks to it are chimaeras he can prove it. Can he, dear? The blind men in Rome said the streets were dark. Finally to end my quotations, Fen[elon] said, ‘O Reason! Reason! art not thou He whom I seek.’—The manifold applications of the distinction to Literature to the Church to Life will show how good a key it is. So hallelujah to the Reason forevermore.
But glad should I be to hold academical questions with you here at Newton. Whenever you are tired of working at Porto Rico & want a vacation or whenever your strength or your weakness shall commend to you the high countenances of the Muses, come & live with me. The Tucker estate is so far settled that I am made sure of an income of about $1200. wherewith the Reason of Mother & you & I might defy the Understanding upon his own ground, for the rest of the few years in which we shall be subject to his insults. I need not say that what I speak in play I speak in earnest. If you will come we will retreat into Berkshire & make a little world of other stuff.
YOUR BROTHER
WALDO.
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January 24, 1835
Concord, Massachusetts
To Miss Lydia Jackson.
I obey my highest impulses in declaring to you the feeling of deep and tender respect with which you have inspired me. I am rejoiced in my Reason as well as in my Understanding by finding an earnest and noble mind whose presence quickens in mine all that is good and shames and repels from me my own weakness. Can I resist the impulse to beseech you to love me? The strict limits of the intercourse I have enjoyed, have certainly not permitted the manifestation of that tenderness which is the first sentiment in the common kindness between man and woman. But I am not less in love, after a new and higher way. I have immense desire that you should love me, and that I might live with you alway. My own assurance of the truth and fitness of the alliance—the union I desire, is so perfect, that it will not admit the thought of hesitation—never of refusal on your part. I could scratch out the word. I am persuaded that I address one so in love with what I love, so conscious with me of the everlasting principles, and seeking the presence of the common Father through means so like, that no remoteness of condition could much separate us, and that an affection founded on such a basis, cannot alter.
I will not embarrass this expression of my heart and mind with any second considerations. I am not therefore blind to them. They touch the past and the future—our friends as well as ourselves, & even the Departed. But I see clearly how your consent shall resolve them all.
And think it not strange, as you will not, that I write rather than speak. In the gravest acts of my life I more willingly trust my pen than my tongue. It is as true. And yet had I been master of my time at this moment. I should bring my letter in my own hand. But I had no leave to wait a day after my mind was made up. Say to me therefore anything but NO. Demand any time for conversation, for consideration, and I will come to Plymouth with a joyful heart. And so God bless you, dear and blessed Maiden. and incline you to love your true friend,
RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
MY ADDRESS IS CONCORD, MASS.
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February 1, 1835
Concord, Massachusetts
One of my wise masters, Edmund Burke, said, ‘A wise man will speak the truth with temperance that he may speak it the longer.’ In this new sentiment that you awaken in me, my Lydian Queen, what might scare others pleases me, its quietness, which I accept as a pledge of permanence. I delighted myself on Friday with my quite domesticated position & the good understanding that grew all the time, yet I went & came without one vehement word—or one passionate sign. In this was nothing of design, I merely surrendered myself to the hour & to the facts. I find a sort of grandeur in the modulated expressions of a love in which the individuals, & what might seem even reasonable personal expectations, are steadily postponed to a regard for truth & the universal love. Do not think me a metaphysical lover. I am a man & hate & suspect the over refiners, & do sympathize with the homeliest pleasures & attractions by which our good foster mother Nature draws her children together. Yet am I well pleased that between us the most permanent ties should be the first formed & thereon should grow whatever others human nature will.
My Mother rejoices very much & asks me all manner of questions about you, many of which I cannot answer. I dont know whether you sing, or read French, or Latin, or where you have lived, & much more. So you see there is nothing for it but that you should come here & on the Battle-Ground stand the fire of her catechism.
Under this morning’s severe but beautiful light I thought dear friend that hardly should I get away from Concord. I must win you to love it. I am born a poet, of a low class without doubt yet a poet. That is my nature & vocation. My singing be sure is very ‘husky,’ & is for the most part in prose. Still am I a poet in the sense of a perceiver & dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul & in matter, & specially of the correspondences between these & those. A sunset, a forest, a snow storm, a certain river-view, are more to me than many friends & do ordinarily divide my day with my books. Wherever I go therefore I guard & study my rambling propensities with a care that is ridiculous to people, but to me is the care of my high calling. Now Concord is only one of a hundred towns in which I could find these necessary objects but Plymouth I fear is not one. Plymouth is streets; I live in the wide champaign.
Time enough for this however. If I succeed in preparing my lecture on Michel Angelo Buonaroti this week for Thursday, I will come to Plymouth on Friday. If I do not succeed—do not attain unto the Idea of that man—I shall read of Luther, Thursday & then I know not when I shall steal a visit.—
Dearest forgive the egotism of all this letter Say they not ‘The more love the more egotism.’ Repay it by as much & more. Write, write to me. And please dear Lidian take that same low counsel & leave thinking for the present & let the winds of heaven blow away your dyspepsia.
WALDO E.
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April 2 or 3, 1837
Concord, Massachusetts
Sir,—I have seen in a Courier of last week, a severe notice of a book lately published in this city called, “Conversations on the Gospels.” In that work, a passage or two occurs, which, separated from the connexion of the book, might give great uneasiness to many readers. Precisely these passages one of the daily papers selected, and dragging them out of the protection of all the philosophy and religion that hedged them round, held them up to pointed censure in its columns. These unlucky sentences,—innocent enough to the reader of the whole book,—were copied with horror into another paper, and now again have kindled the anger of your correspondent, and even your known urbanity has failed you, Sir, for a moment.
In behalf of this book, I have but one plea to make,—this, namely,—Let it be read. Any reasonable man will perceive that fragments out of a new theory of Christian instruction, are not quite in the best place for examination, betwixt the price current and the shipping list. Try the effect of a passage from Plato’s Phaedo, or the Confessions of St. Augustine in the same place.
Mr. Alcott has given proof in the beautiful introduction to this work, as all who have read it know, to a strong mind and a pure heart. A practical teacher, he has dedicated, for years, his rare gifts to the science of education. These Conversations contain abundant evidence of extraordinary power of thought either in the teacher or in the pupils, or in both. He aims to make children think, and in every question of a moral nature, to sent them back on themselves for an answer. He aims to show children something holy in their own consciousness, thereby to make them really reverent, and to make the New Testament a living book to them.
Mr. Alcott’s methods cannot be said to have had a fair trial. But he is making an experiment in which all the friends of education are interested. And I ask you, sir, whether it be wise or just, to add to the anxieties of his enterprise, a public clamor against some detached sentences of a book, which, as a whole is pervaded with original thought and sincere piety.
R.
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September 13, 1837
Concord, Massachusetts
My dear friend,
Such a gift as the French Revolution demanded a speedier acknowledgement. But you mountaineers that can scale Andes before breakfast for an airing, have no measures for the performance of lowlanders & valetudinarians. I am ashamed to think & will not tell what little things have kept me silent.
The “French Revolution” did not reach me until three weeks ago, having had at least two long pauses by the way, as I find, since landing. Between many visits received & some literary haranguing done, I have read two volumes & half the third: and I think you a very good giant; disporting yourself with an original & vast ambition of fun; pleasure & peace not being strong enough for you, you choose to suck pain also, & teach fever & famine to dance & sing. I think you have written a wonderful book which will last a very long time. I see that you have created a history, which the world will own to be such. You have recognized the existence of other persons than officers & of other relations than civism. You have broken away from all books, & written a mind. It is a brave experiment & the success is great. We have men in your story & not names merely; always men, though I may doubt sometimes whether I have the historic men. We have great facts—and selected facts—truly set down. We have always the co-presence of Humanity along with the imperfect damaged individuals. The soul’s right of Wonder is still left to us; and we have righteous praise & doom awarded, assuredly without cant: yes comfort your self on that particular, O ungodliest divine man! Thou cantest never. Finally, we have not—a dull word. Never was there a style so rapid as yours—which no reader can outrun; and so it is for the most intelligent. I suppose nothing will astonish more than the audacious wit of cheerfulness which no tragedy & no magnitude of events can overpower or daunt. Henry VIII loved a man, and I see with joy my bard always equal to the crisis he re-presents. And so I thank you for your labor, and feel that your cotemporaries ought to say, All hail, Brother! live forever; not only in the great Soul which thou largely inhalest, but also as a named person in this thy definite deed.
I will tell you more of the book when I have once got it at focal distance—if that can ever be, and muster my objections when I am sure of their ground. I insist, of course, that it might be more simple, less Gothically efflorescent. You will say no rules for the illumination of windows can apply to the aurora borealis. However, I find refreshment when every now & then a special fact slips into the narrative couched in sharp business like terms. This character-drawing in the book is certainly admirable; the lines are ploughed furrows; but there was cake & ale before, though thou be virtuous. Clarendon surely drew sharp outlines for me in Falkland, Hampden, & the rest, without defiance or skyvaulting. I wish I could talk with you face to face for one day & know what your uttermost frankness would say concerning the book.
I feel assured of its good reception in this Country. I learned last Saturday that in all eleven hundred & sixty six copies of Sartor have been sold. I have told the publisher of that book that he must not print the History until some space has been given to people to import British copies. I have ordered Hilliard, Gray, & Co. to import twenty copies as an experiment. At the present very high rate of exchange which makes a shilling worth 30 cents, they think with freight & duties, the book would be too costly here for sale, but we confide in a speedy fall of exchange—then my books shall come. I am ashamed that you should educate our young men & that we should pirate your books. One day we will have a better law, or perhaps—you will make our law yours.
I had your letter long before your book. Very good work you have done in your lifetime, & very generously you adorn & cheer this pilgrimage of mine by your love. I find my highest prayer granted in calling a just & wise man my friend. Your profuse benefaction of genius in so few years m[akes] me feel very poor & useless. I see that I must go o[n &] trust to you & to all the brave for some longer time, hoping yet to prove one day my truth & love. There are in this country so few scholars, that the services of each studious person are needed to do what he can for the circulation of thoughts, to the end of making some counterweight to the money force & to give such food as he may to the nigh starving Youth. So I religiously read lectures every winter, & at other times whenever summoned. Last year, “the Philosophy of History,” twelve lectures; and now I meditate a course on what I call “Ethics.” I peddle out all the wit I can gather from Time or from Nature, and am pained at heart to see how thankfully that little is received.
Write to me, good friend, tell me if you went to Scotland,—what you do, & will do, tell me that your wife is strong & well again as when I saw her at Craigenputtock. I desire to be affectionately remembered to her. Tell me when you will come hither. I called together a little club a week ago who spent a day with me counting fifteen souls—each one of whom warmly loves you. So if the French Revolution does not convert the “dull public” of your native Nineveh, I see not but you must shake their dust from your shoes & cross the Atlantic to a New England.
YOURS IN LOVE & HONOR,
R. WALDO EMERSON.
May I trouble you with a commission when you are in the City. You mention being at the shop of Rich in Red Lion Square. Will you say to him that he sent me some books two or three years ago without any account of prices annexed. I wrote him once myself,—once through S. Burdett, bookseller; & since through C. P. Curtis, Esq. who professes to be his attorney, in Boston,—three times—to ask for this account. No answer has ever come. I wish he would send me the account, that I may settle it. If he persist in his self-denying contumacy, I think you may immortalise him as bookseller of the Gods.
I shall send you an Oration presently delivered before a literary society here which is now being printed. Gladly I hear of the Carlylet so they say—in the new Westminster.
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April 23, 1838
Concord, Massachusetts
SIR: The seat you fill places you in a relation of credit and nearness to every citizen. By right and natural position, every citizen is your friend. Before any acts contrary to his own judgment or interest have repelled the affections of any man, each may look with trust and living anticipation to your government. Each has the highest right to call your attention to such subjects as are of a public nature, and properly belong to the chief magistrate; and the good magistrate will feel a joy in meeting such confidence. In this belief and at the instance of a few of my friends and neighbors, I crave of your patience a short hearing for their sentiments and my own: and the circumstance that my name will be utterly unknown to you will only give the fairer chance to your equitable construction of what I have to say.
Sir, my communication respects the sinister rumors that fill this part of the country concerning the Cherokee people. The interest always felt in the aboriginal population—an interest naturally growing as that decays—has been heightened in regard to this tribe. Even in our distant State some good rumor of their worth and civility has arrived. We have learned with joy their improvement in the social arts. We have read their newspapers. We have seen some of them in our schools and colleges. In common with the great body of the American people, we have witnessed with sympathy the painful labors of these red men to redeem their own race from the doom of eternal inferiority, and to borrow and domesticate in the tribe the arts and customs of the Caucasian race. And notwithstanding the unaccountable apathy with which of late years the Indians have been sometimes abandoned to their enemies, it is not to be doubted that it is the good pleasure and the understanding of all humane persons in the Republic, of the men and the matrons sitting in the thriving independent families all over the land, that they shall be duly cared for; that they shall taste justice and love from all to whom we have delegated the office of dealing with them.
The newspapers now inform us that, in December, 1835, a treaty contracting for the exchange of all the Cherokee territory was pretended to be made by an agent on the part of the United States with some persons appearing on the part of the Cherokees; that the fact afterwards transpired that these deputies did by no means represent the will of the nation; and that, out of eighteen thousand souls composing the nation, fifteen thousand six hundred and sixty-eight have protested against the so-called treaty. It now appears that the government of the United States choose to hold the Cherokees to this sham treaty, and are proceeding to execute the same. Almost the entire Cherokee Nation stand up and say, “This is not our act. Behold us. Here are we. Do not mistake that handful of deserters for us;” and the American President and the Cabinet, the Senate and the House of Representatives, neither hear these men nor see them, and are contracting to put this active nation into carts and boats, and to drag them over mountains and rivers to a wilderness at a vast distance beyond the Mississippi. And a paper purporting to be an army order fixes a month from this day as the hour for this doleful removal.
In the name of God, sir, we ask you if this be so. Do the newspapers rightly inform us? Men and women with pale and perplexed faces meet one another in the streets and churches here, and ask if this be so. We have inquired if this be a gross misrepresentation from the party opposed to the government and anxious to blacken it with the people. We have looked in the newspapers of different parties and find a horrid confirmation of the tale. We are slow to believe it. We hoped the Indians were misinformed, and that their remonstrance was premature, and will turn out to be a needless act of terror.
The piety, the principle that is left in the United States, if only in its coarsest form, a regard to the speech of men,—forbid us to entertain it as a fact. Such a dereliction of all faith and virtue, such a denial of justice, and such deafness to screams for mercy were never heard of in times of peace and in the dealing of a nation with its own allies and wards, since the earth was made. Sir, does this government think that the people of the United States are become savage and mad? From their mind are the sentiments of love and a good nature wiped clean out? The soul of man, the justice, the mercy that is the heart’s heart in all men, from Maine to Georgia, does abhor this business.
In speaking thus the sentiments of my neighbors and my own, perhaps I overstep the bounds of decorum. But would it not be a higher indecorum coldly to argue a matter like this? We only state the fact that a crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude,—a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country? for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country, any more? You, sir, will bring down that renowned chair in which you sit into infamy if your seal is set to this instrument of perfidy; and the name of this nation, hitherto the sweet omen of religion and liberty, will stink to the world.
You will not do us the injustice of connecting this remonstrance with any sectional and party feeling. It is in our hearts the simplest commandment of brotherly love. We will not have this great and solemn claim upon national and human justice huddled aside under the flimsy plea of its being a party act. Sir, to us the questions upon which the government and the people have been agitated during the past year, touching the prostration of the currency and of trade, seem but motes in comparison. These hard times, it is true, have brought the discussion home to every farmhouse and poor man’s house in this town; but it is the chirping of grasshoppers beside the immortal question whether justice shall be done by the race of civilized to the race of savage man,—whether all the attributes of reason, of civility, of justice, and even of mercy, shall be put off by the American people, and so vast an outrage upon the Cherokee Nation and upon human nature shall be consummated.
One circumstance lessens the reluctance with which I intrude at this time on your attention my conviction that the government ought to be admonished of a new historical fact, which the discussion of this question has disclosed, namely, that there exists in a great part of the Northern people a gloomy diffidence in the moral character of the government.
On the broaching of this question, a general expression of despondency, of disbelief that any good will accrue from a remonstrance on an act of fraud and robbery, appeared in those men to whom we naturally turn for aid and counsel. Will the American government steal? Will it lie? Will it kill?—We ask triumphantly. Our counsellors and old statesmen here say that ten years ago they would have staked their lives on the affirmation that the proposed Indian measures could not be executed; that the unanimous country would put them down. And now the steps of this crime follow each other so fast, at such fatally quick time, that the millions of virtuous citizens, whose agents the government are, have no place to interpose, and must shut their eyes until the last howl and wailing of these tormented villages and tribes shall afflict the ear of the world.
I will not hide from you, as an indication of the alarming distrust, that a letter addressed as mine is, and suggesting to the mind of the Executive the plain obligations of man, has a burlesque character in the apprehensions of some of my friends. I, sir, will not beforehand treat you with the contumely of this distrust. I will at least state to you this fact, and show you how plain and humane people, whose love would be honor, regard the policy of the government, and what injurious inferences they draw as to the minds of the governors. A man with your experience in affairs must have seen cause to appreciate the futility of opposition to the moral sentiment. However feeble the sufferer and however great the oppressor, it is in the nature of things that the blow should recoil upon the aggressor. For God is in the sentiment, and it cannot be withstood. The potentate and the people perish before it; but with it, and as its executor, they are omnipotent.
I write thus, sir, to inform you of the state of mind these Indian tidings have awakened here, and to pray with one voice more that you, whose hands are strong with the delegated power of fifteen millions of men, will avert with that might the terrific injury which threatens the Cherokee tribe.
WITH GREAT RESPECT, SIR, I AM YOUR FELLOW CITIZEN,
RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
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July 28, 1838
Concord, Massachusetts
My dear Sir,
What you say about the Discourse at Divinity College is just what I might expect from your truth & charity combined with your known opinions. “I am not a stock or a stone” as one said in the old time, & could not but feel pain in saying some things in that place & presence where I supposed they might meet dissent—and the dissent, I may say, of dear friends & benefactors of mine. Yet, as my conviction is perfect in the substantial truth of the doctrine, and is not very new, you will see at once that it must appear to me very important that it be spoken out, & I thought I would not pay the nobleness of my friends so mean a compliment as to suppress any opposition to their supposed views out of fear of offence. I would rather say to them These things look so to me; to you otherwise: let us say out our uttermost word, & let the all prevailing Truth, as it surely will, judge between us. We shall either of us I doubt not be equally glad to be apprised of his error. Meantime I shall be admonished by this expression of your thought to revise with greater care the Manuscript before it is printed (for the use of the Class,) & I heartily thank you for this renewed expression of your tried toleration
& love
RESPECTFULLY & AFFECTIONATELY YOURS
R. WALDO EMERSON.
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October 8, 1838
Concord, Massachusetts
My dear Sir,
I ought sooner to have acknowledged your kind letter of last week & the sermon it accompanied. The Letter was right manly & noble
The sermon I have read with attention. If it assails any statements of mine perhaps I am not as quick to see it as most writers certainly I felt no disposition to depart from my habitual contentment that you should speak your thought whilst I speak mine. I believe I must tell you what I think of my new position.
It strikes me very oddly & even a little ludicrously that the good & great men of Cambridge should think of raising me into an object of criticism. I have always been from my very incapacity of methodical writing a chartered libertine free to worship & free to rail lucky when I was understood but never esteemed near enough to the institutions & mind of society to deserve the notice of the masters of literature & religion. I have appreciated fully the advantage of my position for I well knew that there was no scholar less willing or less able to be a polemic. I could not give account of myself if challenged I could not possibly give you one of the “arguments” on which as you cruelly hint any position of mine stands. For I do not know, I confess. what arguments mean in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling what I think but if you ask me how I dare say so or why it is so I am the most helpless of mortal men; I see not even that either of these questions admit of an answer. So that in the present droll posture of my affairs when I see myself suddenly raised into the importance of a heretic, I am very uneasy if I advert to the supposed duties of such a personage who is expected to make good his thesis against all comers. I therefore tell you plainly I shall do no such thing. I shall read what you & other good men write as I have always done glad when you speak my thought & skipping the page that has nothing for me. I shall go on just as before seeing whatever I can & telling what I see and I suppose with the same fortune as has hitherto attended me the joy of finding that my abler & better brothers who work with the sympathy of society & love it, unexpectedly confirm my perceptions, & find my nonsense is only their own thought in motley.
AND SO I AM YOUR AFFECTIONATE SERVANT,
R. W. EMERSON.
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October 17, 1838
Concord, Massachusetts
My dear friend,
In a letter within a twelvemonth I have urged you to pay us a visit in America, & in Concord. I have believed that you would come, one day, & do believe it. But if, on your part, you have been generous & affectionate enough to your friends here—or curious enough concerning our society to wish to come, I think you must postpone, for the present, the satisfaction of your friendship & your curiosity. At this moment, I would not have you here, on any account. The publication of my “Address to the Divinity College,” (copies of which I sent you) has been the occasion of an outcry in all our leading local newspapers against my “infidelity,” “pantheism,” & “atheism.” The writers warn all & sundry against me, & against whatever is supposed to be related to my connexion of opinion, &c; against Transcendentalism, Goethe & Carlyle. I am heartily sorry to see this last aspect of the storm in our washbowl. For, as Carlyle is nowise guilty, & has unpopularities of his own, I do not wish to embroil him in my parish-differences. You were getting to be a great favorite with us all here, and are daily a greater, with the American public, but just now, in Boston, where I am known as your editor, I fear you lose by the association. Now it is indispensable to your right influence here, that you should never come before our people as one of a clique, but as a detached, that is, universally associated man; so I am happy, as I could not have thought, that you have not yet yielded yourself to my entreaties. Let us wait a little until this foolish clam[or] be overblown. My position is fortunately such as to put me quite out of the reach of any real inconvenience from the panic strikers or the panic struck; &, indeed, so far as this uneasiness is a necessary result of mere inaction of mind, it seems very clear to me that, if I live, my neighbors must look for a great many more shocks, & perhaps harder to bear. The article on German Religious Writers in the last Foreign Q. R. suits our meridian as well as yours; as is plainly signified by the circumstance that our newspapers copy into their columns the opening tirade & no more. Who wrote that paper? And who wrote the paper on Montaigne in the Westminster? I read with great satisfaction the Poems & Thoughts of Archaeus in Blackwood: “The Sexton’s daughter” is a beautiful poem: and I recognize in them all, the Soul, with joy & love. Tell me of the author’s health & welfare; or will not he love me so much as to write me a letter with his own hand?—And tell me of yourself,—what task of love & wisdom the muses impose: & what happiness the good God sends to you & yours. I hope your wife has not forgotten me.
YOURS AFFECTIONATELY,
R. W. EMERSON
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October 24, 1840
Concord, Massachusetts
My dear Margaret,
I have your frank & noble & affecting letter, and yet I think I could wish it unwritten. I ought never to have suffered you to lead me into any conversation or writing on our relation, a topic from which with all persons my Genius ever sternly warns me away. I was content & happy to meet on a human footing a woman of sense & sentiment with whom one could exchange reasonable words & go away assured that wherever she went there was light & force & honour. That is to me a solid good; it gives value to thought & the day; it redeems society from that foggy & misty aspect it wears so often seen from our retirements; it is the foundation of everlasting friendship. Touch it not—speak not of it—and this most welcome natural alliance becomes from month to month,—& the slower & with the more intervals the better,—our air & diet. A robust & total understanding grows up resembling nothing so much as the relation of brothers who are intimate & perfect friends without having ever spoken of the fact. But tell me that I am cold or unkind, and in my most flowing state I become a cake of ice. I can feel the crystals shoot & the drops solidify. It may do for others but it is not for me to bring the relation to speech. Instantly I find myself a solitary unrelated person, destitute not only of all social faculty but of all private substance. I see precisely the double of my state in my little Waldo when in the midst of his dialogue with his hobby horse in the full tide of his eloquence I should ask him if he loves me?—he is mute & stupid. I too have never yet lived a moment, have never done a deed—am the youngest child of nature,—I take it for granted that everybody will show me kindness & wit, and am too happy in the observation of all the abundant particulars of the show to feel the slightest obligation resting on me to do any thing or say any thing for the company. I talk to my hobby & will join you in harnessing & driving him, & recite to you his virtues all day—but ask me what I think of you & me,—& I am put to confusion.
Up to this hour our relation has been progressive. I have never regarded you with so much kindness as now. Sometimes you appeal to sympathies I have not and sometimes you inquire into the state of this growth.—that for the moment puts me back, but you presently return to my daylight & we get on admirably.
There is a difference in our constitution. We use a different rhetoric It seems as if we had been born & bred in different nations. You say you understand me wholly. You cannot communicate yourself to me. I hear the words sometimes but remain a stranger to your state of mind
Yet are we all the time a little nearer. I honor you for a brave & beneficent woman and mark with gladness your steadfast good will to me. I see not how we can bear each other anything else than good will though we had sworn to the contrary.
And now what will you? Why should you interfere? See you not that I cannot spare you? that you cannot be spared? that a vast & beautiful Power to whose counsels our will was never party, has thrown us into strict neighborhood for best & happiest ends? The stars in Orion do not quarrel this night, but shine in peace in their old society. Are we not much better than they? Let us live as we have always done. only ever better, I hope, & richer. Speak to me of every thing but myself & I will endeavor to make an intelligible reply. Allow me to serve you & you will do me a kindness; come & see me & you will recommend my house to me; let me visit you and I shall be cheered as ever by the spectacle of so much genius & character as you have always the gift to draw around you.
I see very dimly in writing on this topic. It will not prosper with me. Perhaps all my words are wrong. Do not expect it of me again for a very long time.
I will go look for the letters you ask for & which should have been returned before; but I liked to keep them. And could you not send Alcott a remembrance that smacked not so much of Almacks?
You shall have whatever I can muster for the Dial—yet I do not now know what I can offer you.
YOURS AFFECTIONATELY,
R. W. EMERSON.
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December 15, 1840
Concord, Massachusetts,
My dear Sir,
It is quite time I made an answer to your proposition that I should join you in your new enterprise. The design appears to me so noble & humane, proceeding, as I plainly see, from a manly & expanding heart & mind that it makes me & all men its friends & debtors It becomes a matter of conscience to entertain it friendly & to examine what it has for us.
I have decided not to join it & yet very slowly & I may almost say penitentially. I am greatly relieved by learning that your coadjutors are now so many that you will no longer ascribe that importance to the defection of individuals which you hinted in your letter to me. it might attach to mine.
The ground of my decision is almost purely personal to myself. I have some remains of skepticism in regard to the general practicability of the plan, but these have not much weighed with me. That which determines me is the conviction that the Community is not good for me. Whilst I see it may hold out many inducements for others it has little to offer me which with resolution I cannot procure for myself. It seems to me that it would not be worth my while to make the difficult exchange of my property in Concord for a share in the new Household. I am in many respects suitably placed, in an agreeable neighborhood, in a town which I have many reasons to love & which has respected my freedom so far that I may presume it will indulge me farther if I need it. Here I have friends & kindred. Here I have builded & planted: & here I have greater facilities to prosecute such practical enterprizes as I may cherish, than I could probably find by any removal. I cannot accuse my townsmen or my social position of my domestic grievances:—only my own sloth & conformity. It seems to me a circuitous & operose way of relieving myself of any irksome circumstances, to put on your community the task of my emancipation which I ought to take on myself.
The principal particulars in which I wish to mend my domestic life are in acquiring habits of regular manual labor, and in ameliorating or abolishing in my house the condition of hired menial service. I should like to come one step nearer to nature than this usage permits. I desire that my manner of living may be honest and agreeable to my imagination. But surely I need not sell my house & remove my family to Newton in order to make the experiment of labor & self help. I am already in the act of trying some domestic & social experiments which my present position favors. And I think that my present position has even greater advantages than yours would offer me for testing my improvements in those small private parties into which men are all set off already throughout the world.
—But I own I almost shrink from making any statement of my objections to our ways of living because I see how slowly I shall mend them. My own health & habits & those of my wife & my mother are not of that robustness which should give any pledge of enterprize & ability in reform. And whenever I am engaged in literary composition I find myself not inclined to insist with heat on new methods. Yet I think that all I shall solidly do, I must do alone. I do not think I should gain anything—I who have little skill to converse with people—by a plan of so many parts and which I comprehend so slowly & imperfectly as the proposed Association.
If the community is not good for me neither am I good for it. I do not look on myself as a valuable member to any community which is not either very large or very small & select I fear that yours would not find me as profitable & pleasant an associate as I should wish to be and as so important a project seems imperatively to require in all its constituents Moreover I am so ignorant & uncertain in my improvements that I would fain hide my attempts & failures in solitude where they shall perplex none or very few beside myself The result of our secretest improvements will certainly have as much renown as shall be due to them.
In regard to the plan as far as it respects the formation of a School or College, I have more hesitation, inasmuch as a concentration of scholars in one place seems to me to have certain great advantages. Perhaps as the school emerges to more distinct consideration out of the Farm, I shall yet find it attractive And yet I am very apt to relapse into the same skepticism as to modes & arrangements the same magnifying of the men—the men alone. According to your ability & mine, you & I do now keep school for all comers, & the energy of our thought & will measures our influence. In the community we shall utter not a word more—not a word less.
Whilst I refuse to be an active member of your company I must yet declare that of all the philanthropic projects of which I have heard yours is the most pleasing to me and if it is prosecuted in the same spirit in which it is begun, I shall regard it with lively sympathy & with a sort of gratitude.
YOURS AFFECTIONATELY
R W EMERSON
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September 21, 1841
Concord, Massachusetts
Tuesday P. M.
My dear Aunt
Dr [Ezra] Ripley died this morning soon after four o’clock. He suffered nothing and lay quite insensible since Friday morning when he sustained a paralytic shock. The evening before, he received his brother with great gladness and conversed with his usual sympathy & spirit, &, as they testify who heard, made a wonderful prayer before retiring.
The fall of this oak makes some sensation in the forest, old & doomed as it was, and on many accounts I could wish you had come home with me to the old wigwam & burial mounds of the tribe. He has identified himself with the forms at least of the old church of the New England Puritans: his nature was eminently loyal, not in the least adventurous or democratical, and his whole being leaned backward on the departed, so that he seemed one of the rear guard of this great camp & army which have filled the world with fame, and with him passes out of sight almost the last banner & guide’s flag of a mighty epoch; for these men, however in our last days they have declined into ritualists, solemnized the heyday of their strength by the planting and the liberating of America. Great, grim, earnest men! I belong by natural affinity to other thoughts & schools than yours but my affection hovers respectfully about your retiring footprints, your unpainted churches, strict platforms & sad offices, the iron gray deacon and the wearisome prayer rich with the diction of ages. Well the new is only the seed of the old. What is this abolition and Nonresistance & Temperance but the continuation of Puritanism, though it operate inevitably the destruction of the Church in which it grew, as the new is always making the old superfluous. I admire the letter of your friend T. T. Stone. Nothing can be better in the way of general statement on the subject of Transcendentalism than his third page. I should not say the same things or all of the same, but he should: and I have copied that page to show to others. Write as much as you please of him & from him, whenever you do not write of yourself.
I am sorry to have bro’t home, as I ignorantly did, the Dial which I carried you. Examiners Jouffroys or the like come never into my study, however they may at Waltham. No paper, no review—Nothing but old Plotinus, Iamblichus, Mores, Cudworths, & Browns. Bettina I offered you, but you quite excluded it with contempt. Do you want Carlyle’s “Six Lectures.,” his last book? I will have it bound immediately—tis in sheets—& lend it to you: and Lidian will send her “Beggar Girl,” and in a few days you shall have a new Dial with brand new poetry & prose of Antony White’s! I will also attend to the paper & sealing wax with great joy & much penitence for my constitutional short comings. I have no time to say anything today which you wish to hear except that I am your affectionate
WALDO E.
Mamma’s love & heartily wishes you could see the corpse of the old man, which she says is “the beauty of the dead,” a rare expression you will say from my mother. It was indeed a soldier’s or a sachem’s corpse. & lies on the old couch we all know.
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January 28, 1842
Concord, Massachusetts
Dear Margaret,
My little boy must die also. All his wonderful beauty could not save him. He gave up his innocent breath last night and my world this morning is poor enough. He had Scarlatina on Monday night. Shall I ever dare to love any thing again. Farewell and Farewell, O my Boy!
W.
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February 2, 1842
Concord, Massachusetts
Dear Margaret,
I am not going to write you a letter but only to say in reply to your request, that we are finding again our hands & feet after our dull & dreadful dream which does not leave us where it found us. Lidian, Elizabeth, & I recite chronicles words & tones of our fair boy & magnify our lost treasure to extort if we can the secretest wormwood of the grief, & see how bad is the worst. Meantime the sun rises & the winds blow Nature seems to have forgotten that she has crushed her sweetest creation and perhaps would admonish us that as this Child’s attention could never be fastened on any death, but proceeded still to enliven the new toy, so we children must have no retrospect, but illuminate the new hour if possible with an undiminished stream of rays.
WALDO E
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May 6, 1843
Concord, Massachusetts
My dear Sir,
It is hardly true to the relation between us that no intercourse should occur until I shall sometime go to your city or you shall pass through my village; and yet a friendly silence is more grateful than inadequate communion, as most Communions are. I recall with lively pleasure our free conversations, cheered to me by the equal love, courage, & intelligence I met, and if I were a day younger or had a few grains more of reliance on circumstances, I should have already more than once obeyed my inclination to ask how your dice were falling and furthermore whether there were no hope that they might fall within the Massachusetts line. For I could not help feeling in talking with you how much you would enjoy the society of a few persons whom I most value, & with the assurance of being valued in return. But this & the like of this, I leave with the silent Disposer who loveth not meddlers, & often allows them to punish themselves. I live in Concord, & value my nest, yet I will not promise to myself or another that I shall not in a year or two flee to Berkshire from so public & metropolitan a place as this quietest of country towns.
But the reason of my writing now is to inform you that a friend of mine who has been an inmate of my house for the last two years, Henry D. Thoreau is now going, tomorrow, to N. Y. to live with my brother William at Staten Island, to take charge of the education of his son. I should like both for Mr Thoreau’s & for your own sake that you would meet and see what you have for each other. Thoreau is a profound mind and a person of true magnanimity, and if it should happen that there is some village pedantry & tediousness of facts, it will easily be forgotten when you come at what is better. One can never be sure that these delicatest of all experiments, experiments of men & intercourse, will prosper, but if you remain in the city this summer, which seemed uncertain, I wish you would send your card to him through my brother at 64 Wall Street. I want that he should tell you about our Dial, which has just escaped the fate of being extinguished. Can you not send me some brief record of your faith or hope to enliven our little journal with a new element?—I have never learned from [William] Tappan whether he carried home your Montaigne & found you, That also I had much at heart and now the ‘other friend’ G[iles]. Waldo, has come to N. Y. & as I understand it, the two are in the same office. Gladly I would learn how you prosper with [William Henry] Channing also.—I had nearly forgotten to say that if you meet Mr [Parke] Godwin, as I believe you know him, you would mention Thoreau to him, as one of our main contributors to the Dial, and as one who would be very glad of literary employment and would make on many subjects very valuable papers. He hopes to make his pen useful to him through the Journals or Booksellers. Here is a longer letter than I dreamed of when I began, yet I wish to be remembered to Mrs James.
YOUR AFFECTIONATE SERVANT,
R. W. EMERSON.
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December 17, 1843
Concord, Massachusetts
Dear Margaret
My life is made up of excuses, I have thought lately, and I will not add new ones to you—Meantime the deed the affirmation which burns up all apologies delays to be born. The felon Dial, the felon lectures, friend, wife, child, house, woodpile, each in turn is the guilty cause why life is postponed If life were a hoax, what an admirable devil must he be who puts it on us, delay breeding delay & obstruction obstruction until the seventy years are fully told, & we ar bowed out before we have even begun. Truly the founders of Oxford fellowships & of celibate orders & the administrators of oaths of silence & of solitude were wise endeavourers & many failures should not discredit their prudence. Deception endless deception,—tis wonderful how rich the world is in this opium. The inexorable demand of every hour, of every eye that is fixed on us, of every friendly tongue, is that we lead the impossible right life; and every step in that direction has a ridiculous & an insane appearance. It requires an enormous perspective, some centuries perhaps, to correct these obliquities & wild refractions of our vision, but we cannot wait for the aesthetic gratification, but must keep the road to Heaven though it lead through Bedlam. It is lucky for the peace of Boston & all honest cities that the scholars & the religious generally are such puny bodies; if they had any vigour answerable to their perception, they would start aside every day from expectation & their own prescription, and destroy the peace of all burgesses. For me, I have only impulse enough to brood now & then on the conditions favorable to thought & life, but not enough yet to make me either pirate or poet. And this “Not Yet” is the arch deceiver of all the ages, and when we sleep will deceive our children.—Will it be any consolation to you in these clouded days—which you describe—of your muse, to hear the confessions of weakness? No no we have very quickly enough of the litanies of “miserable sinners.”—I am, as always, so now newly bound to you, for this good deed of yours to Sterling, which you so depreciate. I make up my mind that it will be good. Yes, do write of Mrs [Lydia Maria] Child’s book, a thankful sentence. Your copy, it is said, has disappeared, then I will send you mine. Mr Lane was here lately again for two or three days having been arrested for his taxes as he stopped with the Harvard Stage at the tavern. He declined bringing any friend to answer for him & was put into jail. Rockwood Hoar heard of it & paid the debt, & when I came home from seeing you in Boston I found him at my house. He was sad & indisposed. Now he & Mr Alcott think they have been wrong in all these years with Pestalozzi in lauding the Maternal instinct, & the Family, &c. These they now think are the very mischief. These are selfish & oppose the establishment of the community which stands on universal love: You shall see.
Ellery is actually chopping now for more than a week past oak trees in Lincoln Woods. He puts all poets & especially all prophets far far in the background. Your friend
WALDO—
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May 14, 1846
Concord, Massachusetts
Dear friend
I daily expect the picture, & wonder—so long as I have wished it, I had never asked it before. I was in Boston the other day & went to the best reputed Daguerrotypist, but though I brought home three transcripts of my face, the housemates voted them rueful, supremely ridiculous, I must sit again, or, as true Elizabeth Hoar said, I must not sit again, not being of the right complexion which Daguerre & iodine delight in. I am minded to try once more, and if the sun will not take me, I must sit to a good crayon sketcher Mr Cheney, & send you his draught.
For Wiley & Putnam, I am glad if you like the bargain. It has this drawback it is nothing yet. Ever since they learned anything about an appendix, they have said we will not print till that comes. In the interim their book sells but not for you. Certainly by all means let the sheets be given to Putnam in London.
Good rides to you & the longest escapes from London streets! I too have a new plaything, the best I ever had—a woodlot. Last fall I bought a piece of more than forty acres on the border of a little lake half a mile wide & more, called Walden Pond—a place to which my feet have for years been accustomed to bring me once or twice in a week at all seasons. My lot to be sure is on the further side of the water, not so familiar to me as the nearer shore. Some of the wood is an old growth, but most of it has been cut off within twenty years & is growing thriftily. In these May days, when maples poplars oaks birches walnut & pine are in their spring glory, I go thither every afternoon, & cut with my hatchet an Indian path through the thicket all along the bold shore, & open the finest pictures. My two little girls know the road now though it is nearly two miles from my house & find their way to the spring at the foot of a pine grove & with some awe to the ruins of a village of shanties all overgrown with mullein which the Irish who built the railroad left behind them. At a good distance in from the shore the land rises to a rocky head, perhaps sixty feet above the water. Thereon I think to place a hut, perhaps it will have two stories & be a petty tower, looking out to Monadnoc & other New Hampshire Mountains. There I hope to go with book & pen when good hours come. I shall think there, a fortnight might bring you from London to Walden Pond.—Life wears on, and do you say the grey hairs appear? Few can so well afford them. The black have not hung over a vacant brain as England & America know, nor white or black will it give itself any sabbath for many a day henceforward, as I believe. What have we to do with old age. Our existence looks to me more than ever initial. We have come to see the ground & look up materials & tools. The men who have any positive quality are a flying advance party for reconnoitering. We shall yet have a right work & kings for competitors. With ever affectionate remembrance to your wife, your friend
R. W. EMERSON.
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June 25, 1846
Concord, Massachusetts
Gentlemen,
I request the privilege of borrowing books from the College Library, subject to the usual rules for their safety & return.
I do not find myself included in any class of persons entitled by law to this privilege. I ask it as an alumnus of the College engaged in literary pursuits, & constantly in want of books which only the University can supply, & which it has provided for precisely such needs as mine; and as, in my residence, conveniently situated for easy access to Cambridge
I have formerly endeavoured to borrow books by special orders signed, in each case, by the President. But this mode is very troublesome to the President, & very inconvenient to the borrower. It may easily happen, as it has happened to me, that after I have selected my books at the Library, the President is not at home, or not at liberty; then I must return to my house, fourtee miles distant, without them.
Presuming the willingness of the Corporation to extend the usefulness of their valuable Library to the utmost limits compatible with safety, I pray them to grant me the right of taking books thence, from time to time, in my own name.
R. WALDO EMERSON.
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August 6, 1847
Concord, Massachusetts
Dear Furness,
It was very wrong in you not to come & see me in any of these your northern flights. The last of your Boston visits, for example, I set down as a clear case of contumacy, that you would neither come to me nor be at home where I went to see you. I hope you had my card, which I left at Dr Gannett’s. But now I write because Henry D. Thoreau has a book to print. Henry D. Thoreau is a great man in Concord, a man of original genius & character who knows Greek & knows Indian also,—not the language quite as well as John Eliot—but the history monuments & genius of the Sachems, being a pretty good Sachem himself, master of all woodcraft, & an intimate associate of the birds, beasts, & fishes, of this region. I could tell you many a good story of his forest life.—He has written what he calls, “A Week on the Concord & Merrimack Rivers,” which is an account of an excursion made by himself & his brother (in a boat which he built) some time ago, from Concord, Mass., down the Concord river & up the Merrimack, to Concord N.H.—I think it a book of wonderful merit, which is to go far & last long. It will remind you of Isaak Walton, and, if it have not all his sweetness, it is rich, as he is not, in profound thought.—Thoreau sent the manuscript lately to Duyckinck,—Wiley & Putnam’s literary Editor, who examined it, & “gave a favorable opinion of it to W. & P.” They have however declined publishing it. And I have promised Thoreau that I would inquire publishing it. And I have before we begin to set our own types. Would Mr Hart, or Mr Kay like to see such a manuscript? It will make a book as big as my First Series of Essays. They shall have it on half profits, or on any reasonable terms. Thoreau is mainly bent on having it printed in a cheap form for a large circulation.
You wrote me once & asked about Hedge. I esteem & respect him always more & more. He is best seen at Bangor. I saw him there last October & heard him preach all day. He is a solid person who cannot be spared in a whole population of levities. I think he is like one of those slow growing pear trees whose fruit is finer every year & at last becomes a Beurré Incomparable. I bade him goodbye seven or eight weeks ago, on board the “Washington Irving,” & expect to see him in England next spring. Do you know that I am going thither in October? Will not Henry Thoreau serve as well as another apology for writing to you.
YOURS EVER,
R. W. EMERSON.
It may easily happen that you have too many affairs even to ask the question of the booksellers. Then simply say that you do not; for my party is Anacharsis the Scythian, and as imperturbable as Osceola.
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December 2, 1847
Manchester, England
Dear Henry,
Very welcome in the parcel was your letter, very precious your thoughts & tidings. It is one of the best things connected with my coming hither that you could & would keep the homestead, that fireplace shines all the brighter,—and has a certain permanent glimmer therefor. Thanks, evermore thanks for the kindness which I well discern to the youth of the house, to my darling little horseman of pewter, leather, wooden, rocking & what other breeds, destined, I hope, to ride Pegasus yet, and I hope not destined to be thrown, to Edith who long ago drew from you verses which I carefully preserve, & to Ellen who by speech & now by letter I find old enough to be companionable, & to choose & reward her own friends in her own fashions. She sends me a poem today, which I have read three times!—I believe, I must keep back all my communication on English topics until I get to London which is England. Everything centralizes, in this magnificent machine which England is. Manufacturer for the world she is become or becoming one complete tool or engine in herself—Yesterday the time all over the kingdom was reduced to Greenwich time. At Liverpool, where I was, the clocks were put forward 12 minutes. This had become quite necessary on account of the railroads which bind the whole country into swiftest connexion, and require so much accurate interlocking, intersection, & simultaneous arrival, that the difference of time produced confusion. Every man in England carries a little book in his pocket called “Bradshaws Guide”, which contains time tables of every arrival & departure at every station on all the railroads of the kingdom. It is published anew on the first day of every month & costs sixpence. The proceeding effects of Electric telegraph will give a new importance to such arrangements.—But lest I should not say what is needful, I will postpone England once for all,—and say that I am not of opinion that your book shoul[d] be delayed a month. I should print it at [on]ce, nor do I think that you would incur any risk in doing so that you cannot well afford. It is very certain to have readers & debtors here as well as there. The Dial is absurdly well known here. We at home, I think, are always a little ashamed of it,—I am,—and yet here it is spoken of with the utmost gravity, & I do not laugh. Carlyle writes me that he is reading Domesday Book.—You tell me in your letter one odious circumstance, which we will dismiss from remembrance henceforward. Charles Lane entreated me, in London, to ask you to forward his Dials to him, which must be done, if you consent, thus. Three bound vols are among his books in my library The 4th Vol is in unbound numbers at J Munroe & Co’s shop received there in a parcel to my address a day or two before I sailed & which I forgot to carry to Concord It must be claimed without delay It is certainly there, was opened by me, & left. And they can enclose all 4 vols. to Chapman for me.—Well I am glad the Pleasaunce at Walden suffered no more but it is a great loss as it is which years will not repair.—I see that I have baulked you by the promise of a letter which ends in as good as none But I write with counted minutes & a miscellany of things before me. Yours affectionately,
R. W. E.
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September 18, 1850
Concord, Massachusetts
Dear Madam,
I have waited a very long time since I had your letter, because I had no clear answer to give, and now I write rather that I may not neglect your letter, than because I have anything very material to say. The fact of the political & civil wrongs of woman I deny not. If women feel wronged, then they are wronged. But the mode of obtaining a redress, namely, a public convention called by women is not very agreeable to me, and the things to be agitated for do not seem to me the best. Perhaps I am superstitious & traditional, but whilst I should vote for every franchise for women,—vote that they should hold property, and vote, yes & be eligible to all offices as men—whilst I should vote thus, if women asked, or if men denied it these things, I should not wish women to wish political functions, nor, if granted assume them. I imagine that a woman whom all men would feel to be the best, would decline such privileges if offered, & feel them to be obstacles to her legitimate influence. Yet I confess lay no great stress on my opinion, since we are all liable to be deceived by the false position into which our bad politics throw elections & electors. If our politics were a little more rational we might not feel any unfitness in accompanying women to the polls. At all events, that I may not stand in the way of any right you are at liberty if you wish it to use my name as one of the inviters of the convention, though I shall not attend it, & shall regret that it is not rather a private meeting of thoughtful persons sincerely interested, instead of what a public meeting is pretty sure to be a heartless noise which we are all ashamed of when it is over. Yours respectfully
R. W. EMERSON.
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November 17 and 18, 1850, noon
Concord, Massachusetts
Dear Caroline,
The parcel came safely & on Friday morning. I read much & I believe the largest part of it. I find it perfectly like all I had read before of Margaret’s, & thoroughly creditable to her. So much wit, ready & rapid learning, appreciation, so much probity constancy & aspiration, when shall we see again? Then what capacity for friendship! Her discriminating & proud election of her friends from afar, her brave & flowing intercourse with them, her quarrels, patience, pardons with & of them, are all good. But if I could have had any doubt earlier, I can have none now that those elevations & new experiences of which she sometimes wrote & spoke, & which she well knew how to adorn with a whole literature of mystical symbols, were quite constitutional, & had no universal sense whatever—The best effect of these fervid pages is the fine praise they give to every thing liberal, and the admonition to self reliance & courage. I grieve to find in them so much grief, belief in a bitter destiny, &c., which her clear mind & great heart should not have admitted, though the head ached & the knees shook. But she used her gifts so well, & against so much resistance, that almost none has a right to blame her.—Yes, it is too obvious that all her estimates of men, books, pictures, were distorted a little or much by her highly-refracting atmosphere, & therefore her statement is never catholic & true. But as an impulse & (a)inspiration to whole files & companies of young men & women, & these the best, the memory of her decisive choices & of the marvellous eloquence in which she conveyed them will remain one of the best things our time has afforded us.—I had large & vague expectation of what amount of manuscript you would send, & perhaps had some disappointment in the actual reading.—I had hoped from what Ellery said, there were two or three Journals, & that you would not burn them; and I hoped there would be more recent letters, from New York, & from Europe. But a seal seems to be set when she leaves Boston. Nothing of any importance comes to me, after that time. I saw William Story & his wife, last week; they give the friendliest pictures of Margaret; that was pleasant,—and describe her agreeable relations with her Italian ladies & with the Brownings. and repeated the story I had heard from the Springs of the first acquaintance with Ossoli. But no mots & no action. William Channing will use his own materials so that I have nothing more to look for. Charles K. N[ewcomb]. has written again to say that he has been ill & is not quite yet able to come.—The whole reading has been an Egyptian chamber to me, filling me with strange regrets that my first dealing with the facts themselves was hardly more substantial than with these shadows of them. But I shall have more to say. Ever Yours,
R. W. E.
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February 19, 1853
Concord, Massachusetts
My dear Sir,
I read the Petition [for women’s suffrage] with attention, & with the hope that I should find myself so happy as to do what you bade me. But this is my feeling in regard to the whole matter: I wish that done for their rights which women wish done. If they wish to vote, I shall vote that they vote. If they wish to be lawyers & judges, I shall vote that those careers be opened to them But I do not think that wise & wary women wish to be electors or judges; and I will not ask that they be made such against their will If we obtain for them the ballot, I suppose the best women would not vote. By all means let their rights of property be put on the same basis as those of men, or, I should say, on a more favorable ground. And let women go to women, & bring us certain tidings what they want, & it will be imperative on me & on us all to help them get it.
I am sorry that you should have had to write twice. Though I am a slow correspondent, I should have written today, without a second urgency. Do not despair of me. I am still open to reason.
YOURS GRATEFULLY,
R. W. EMERSON
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July 21, 1855
Concord, Massachusetts
Dear Sir,
I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes /us/ happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile & stingy Nature, as if too much handiwits fat & mean. I give you joy of your free & brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment, which so delights us, & which large perception only can inspire.
I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying & encouraging.
I did not know until I, last night, saw the book advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust the name as real & available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, & have felt much like striking my tasks, & visiting New York to pay you my respects.
R. W. EMERSON.
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May, 6, 1856
Concord, Massachusetts
Dear Carlyle,
There is no escape from the forces of time & life, & we do not write letters to the gods or to our friends, but only to attorneys landlords & tenants. But the planes or platforms on which all stand remain the same, & we are ever expecting the descent of the heavens, which is to put us into familiarity with the first named. When I ceased to write to you for a long time, I said to myself,—If any thing really good should happen here,—any stroke of good sense or virtue in our politics, or of great sense in a book,—I will send it on the instant to the formidable man; but I will not repeat to him every month, that there are no news. Thank me for my resolution, & for keeping it through the long night. One book, last summer, came out in New York, a nondescript monster which yet has terrible eyes & buffalo strength, & was indisputably American,—which I thought to send you; but the book throve so badly with the few to whom I showed it, & wanted good morals so much, that I never did. Yet I believe now again, I shall. It is called “Leaves of Grass,”—was written & printed by a journeyman printer in Brooklyn, N. Y. named Walter Whitman; and after you have looked into it, if you think, as you may, that it is only an auctioneer’s inventory of a warehouse, you can light your pipe with it.
EVER AFFECTIONATELY YOURS,
R. W. EMERSON
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January 10, 1863
Concord, Massachusetts
Dear Sir,
Mr Walt Whitman, of New York, writes me, that he wishes to obtain employment in the public service in Washington, & has made, or is / about/ making some application to yourself.
Permit me to say that he is known to me as a man of strong original genius, combining, with marked eccentricities, great powers & valuable traits of character: a self-relying, large-hearted man, much beloved by his friends; entirely patriotic & benevolent in his theory, tastes, & practice. If his writings are in certain points open to criticism, they yet show extraordinary power, & are more deeply American, democratic, & in the interest of political liberty, than those of any other poet. He is indeed a child of the people, & their champion.
A man of his talents & dispositions will quickly make himself useful, and, if the Government has work that he can do, I think it may easily find, that it has called to its side more valuable aid than it bargained for.
WITH GREAT RESPECT,
YOUR OBEDIENT SERVANT,
R. W. EMERSON
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December 13, 1864
Concord, Massachusetts
Dear Agassiz,
I pray you have no fear that I did or can say any word unfriendly to you or to the Museum,—for both of which blessings—the cause & the effect—I daily thank Heaven, May you both increase & multiply for ages! I cannot defend my lectures,—they are prone to be clumsy & hurried botches,—still less answer for any report,—which I never dare read.—but I can tell you the amount of my chiding. I vented some of the old grudge I owe the College now for 45 years, for the cruel waste of two years of College time on Mathematics without any attempt to adapt by skilful tutors or by private instruction these tasks to the capacity of slow learners. I still remember the useless pains I took, & my serious recourse to my tutor for aid, which he did not know how to give me. And now I see, today, the same indiscriminate imposing of mathematics on all students, during two years,—ear or no ear, you shall all learn music,—to the waste of time & health of a large part of every class. It is both natural & laudable in each professor to magnify his department, & to seek to make it the first in the world, if he can. But, of course, this tendency must be corrected by securing in the Constitution of the College a power in the Head (whether singular or plural) of co-ordinating all the parts. Else, important departments will be overlaid, as, in Oxford & in Harvard, Natural History was until now. Now it looks as if Natural History would obtain in time to come the like predominance as Math.s have here or Greek at Oxford It will not grieve me if it should, for we are all curious of Nature but not of Algebra. But the necessity of check on the instructors in the Head of the College, I am sure you will agree with me is indispensable.—You will see that my allusion to Natural History is only incidental to my statement of my grievance—But I have made my letter ridiculously long, and pray you to remember that you have brought it on your own head. I do not know that I ever attempted before, an explanation of any speech. Always with entire regard, yours,
R. W. EMERSON
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May 16, 1866
Concord, Massachusetts
My dear Carlyle,
I have just been shown a private letter from Moncure Conway to one of his friends here, giving some tidings of your sad return to an empty home. We had the first news last week. And so it is. The stroke long-threatened has fallen at last, in the mildest form to its victim, & relieved to you by long & repeated reprieves. I must think her fortunate also in this gentle departure, as she had been in her serene & honored career. We would not for ourselves count covetously the descending steps, after we have passed the top of the mount, or grudge to spare some of the days of decay. And you will have the peace of knowing her safe, & no longer a victim. I have found myself recalling an old verse which one utters to the parting soul,—
“For thou hast passed all change of human life,
And not again to thee shall beauty die.”
It is thirty three years in July, I believe, since I first saw her, & her conversation & faultless manners gave assurance of a good & happy future. As I have not witnessed any decline, I can hardly believe in any, & still recall vividly the the youthful wife & her blithe account of her letters & homages from Goethe, & the details she gave of her intended visit to Weimar, & its disappointment. Her goodness to me & to my friends was ever perfect, & all Americans have agreed in her praise. Elizabeth Hoar remembers her with entire sympathy & regard.
I could heartily wish to see you for an hour in these lonely days. Your friends, I know, will approach you as tenderly as friends can; and I can believe that labor,—all whose precious secrets you know,—will prove a consoler,—though it cannot quite avail,—for she was the rest that rewarded labor. It is good that you are strong, & built for endurance. Nor will you shun to consult the aweful oracles which in these hours of tenderness are sometimes vouchsafed. If to any, to you.
I rejoice that she stayed to enjoy the knowledge of your good day at Edinburgh, which is a leaf we would not spare from your book of life. It was a right manly speech to be so made, & is a voucher of unbroken strength—and the surroundings, as I learn, were all the happiest,—with no hint of change. I pray you bear in mind your own counsels. Long years you must still achieve, and, I hope, neither grief nor weariness will let you “join the dim choir of the bards that have been,” until you have written the book I wish & wait for,—the sincerest confessions of your best hours. My wife prays to be remembered to you with sympathy & affection.
EVER YOURS FAITHFULLY,
R. W. EMERSON
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September 23, 1866
Concord, Massachusetts
My dear Sir,
I hear with great interest that your friends believe that your District will elect you to Congress, & that you will perhaps yield your objections & go there. I heartily hope both statements are true, or that you will speedily make them true. With your extraordinary adaptation by genius, by training, & by the experience of success, I do not know how you can hesitate, (now that the Constitution has come to your terms,) when the Country formally asks you to do that for it which you have ever been ready to volunteer. When the people say, ‘We have learned at last that your words are true, & your counsels sound—Come & guide us’—not to go would imply doubt on your part of their practicability. You enter the canvass with one advantage,—to lose the election would damage a political man, but cannot hurt you. Then if it were not for the extreme need at this hour of character & counsel at Washington, I should look beyond, & say,—if this design is carried into full effect, it fortifies every good step taken, & ripens good hopes, not here only, but in England, in Italy, in Protestant & liberal Germany.
But though these are animating lights in the wonderful picture of the time, the American questions will not let you sleep, or refuse to answer them, or find time yet for any others. So I rest & rejoice in the belief, that when some what so essentially belonging to you comes to you, you will receive it.
WITH AFFECTIONATE REGARD
R. W. EMERSON
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April 14, 1868
Concord, Massachusetts
My dear Miss Lazarus,
You are very kind to write again, & it is good in these cold misplaced days to see your letters on my old desk. I shall not lose my faith in the return of spring. It is the more kind that you risk the wasting of time on such a shut-up dilatory correspondent. But on poetry there is so much to say, that I know not where to begin, & really wish to reply by a treatise of thirty sheets. I should like to be appointed your professor, you being required to attend the whole term. I should be very stern & exigeant, & insist on large readings & writings, & from haughty points of view. For a true lover of poetry must fly wide for his game, &, though the spirit of poetry is universal & is nearest, yet the successes of poets are scattered in all times & nations, & only in single passages, or single lines, or even words; nay, the best are sometimes in writers of prose. But I did not mean to begin my inaugural discourse on this note; but only sat down to say that I find I am coming to New York in the beginning of next week, & I rely on your giving me an hour, & on your being docile, & concealing all your impatience of your tutor, nay, on your inspiring him by telling him your own results.
IN WHICH GOOD HOPE,
I REST YOURS FAITHFULLY,
R. W. EMERSON
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August 19, 1870
Concord, Massachusetts
My dear friend,
I have not known how to write to you since I received your painful note. I had seen the bulletin in the journals without a suspicion that it touched any friend of mine. You know how the eye learns to rush over these records of outrages which we cannot hinder or in any manner repair. Your letter was a dreadful surprise I think very sadly of the desolation which this shock must bring to your peaceful house & to yourself. I can easily see that this ghastly incident will for a long time refuse to be forgotten or hidden or veiled. It will force seriousness & searching insights into the common day which can hide such grim contingences in the current of life which flowed so softly. One can hardly help giving a self application to a terror that thunders like this. Life is serious: Only principles,—nothing less than relations to heaven itself can keep our serenity amid these horrors. I know how we hate & shun the dismal. It seems rather to lead from than to thought, & so wastes the Soul. But that doleful tract is part also of the Universe, &, if patiently watched, grows translucent presently, & its news is at last good.
But I ought not to add words. In the presence of dismaying events we must be as self-collected & sane as we can, & await the return of the Divine Soul which will not forget us in these extremes. Perhaps the best facts in history are the triumphs of the will of the sufferer in fiercest pain. In my childhood my ear was filled with such examples by my guardian Aunt: but in my stagnant life they have been only pictures. Perhaps each of us is to pass somewhere through each experience once. I shall gladly hear from you when you are at liberty to write. Meantime, I beg you to offer my respect & sympathy to your parents & sisters.
YOUR FRIEND,
R. W. EMERSON
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January 22, 1877
Concord, Massachusetts
Dear Sir,
I have to thank you for the very friendly notice of myself which I find in Belford’s Monthly Magazine, which I ought to have acknowledged some days ago. The tone of it is courtly & kind, & suggests that the writer is no stranger to Boston & its scholars. In one or two hints he seems to me to have been mis-informed. The only pain he gives me is in his estimate of Thoreau, whom he underrates. Thoreau was a superior genius. I read his books & manuscripts always with new surprise at the range of his topics & the novelty & depth of his thought. A man of large reading, of quick perception, of great practical courage & ability,—who grew greater every day, &, had his short life been prolonged would have found few equals to the power & wealth of his mind. By the death recently, in Bangor, Maine, of his sister, Miss Sophia Thoreau, his Manuscripts (which fill a large trunk,) have been bequeathed to H. G. O. Blake, Esq, of Worcester, Masstts, one of his best friends, & who, I doubt not, will devote himself to the care & the publication of some of these treasures.
When your journeys lead you to Boston, it would give me pleasure to have a card from you of your address. With kind regards,
R. W. EMERSON