stereotype
character of this volume, and its cheap price, may perhaps deter
pirates,--who are but a weak body in this country as yet. I
judged it right to help in that; and impertinent, at this stage
of affairs, to go any farther. The Book is very fairly printed,
onward. at least to the Essay _New England Politics,_ where my
"perfect-copy" of the sheets as yet stops. I did not read any of
the Proofs except two; finding it quite superfluous, and a sad
waste of time to the hurried Chapman himself. I have found yet
but one error, and that a very correctable one, "narvest" for
"harvest";--no other that I recollect at present.

The work itself falling on me by driblets has not the right
chance yet--not till I get it in the bound state, and read it all
at once--to produce its due impression on me. But I will say
already of it, It is a _sermon_ to me, as all your other
deliberate utterances are; a real _word,_ which I feel to be
such,--alas, almost or altogether the one such, in a world all
full of jargons, hearsays, echoes, and vain noises, which cannot
pass with me for _words!_ This is a praise far beyond any
"literary" one; literary praises are not worth repeating in
comparison. For the rest, I have to object still (what you will
call objecting against the Law of Nature) that we find you a
Speaker indeed, but as it were a _Soliloquizer_ on the eternal
mountain-tops only, in vast solitudes where men and their affairs
lie all hushed in a very dim remoteness; and only the man and
the stars and the earth are visible,--whom, so fine a fellow
seems he, we could perpetually punch into, and say, "Why won't
you come and help us then? We have terrible need of one man like
you down among us! It is cold and vacant up there; nothing
paintable but rainbows and emotions; come down, and you shall do
life-pictures, passions, facts,--which _transcend_ all thought,
and leave it stuttering and stammering! To which he answers that
he won't, can't, and doesn't want to (as the Cockneys have it):
and so I leave him, and say, "You Western Gymnosophist! Well, we
can afford one man for that too. But--!--By the bye, I ought to
say, the sentences are very _brief;_ and did not, in my sheet
reading, always entirely cohere for me. Pure genuine Saxon;
strong and simple; of a clearness, of a beauty--But they did
not, sometimes, rightly stick to their foregoers and their
followers: the paragraph not as a beaten ingot, but as a
bea