was glad of a chance to have business with
you; and, of course, was too thankful for any Preface. Thanks
to you for the kind thought of a "Notice," and for its friendly
wit. You shall not do this thing again, if I should send you any
more books. A Preface from you is a sort of banner or oriflamme,
a little too splendid for my occasion, and misleads. I fancy my
readers to be a very quiet, plain, even obscure class,--men and
women of some religious culture and aspirations, young, or else
mystical, and by no means including the great literary and
fashionable army, which no man can count, who now read your
books. If you introduce me, your readers and the literary papers
try to read me, and with false expectations. I had rather have
fewer readers and only such as belong to me.

I doubt not your stricture on the book as sometimes unconnected
and inconsecutive is just. Your words are very gentle. I should
describe it much more harshly. My knowledge of the defects of
these things I write is all but sufficient to hinder me from
writing at all. I am only a sort of lieutenant here in the
deplorable absence of captains, and write the laws ill as
thinking it a better homage than universal silence. You
Londoners know little of the dignities and duties of country
lyceums. But of what you say now and heretofore respecting the
remoteness of my writing and thinking from real life, though I
hear substantially the same criticism made by my countrymen, I do
not know what it means. If I can at any time express the law and
the ideal right, that should satisfy me without measuring the
divergence from it of the last act of Congress. And though I
sometimes accept a popular call, and preach on Temperance or the
Abolition of Slavery, as lately on the 1st of August, I am sure
to feel, before I have done with it, what an intrusion it is into
another sphere, and so much loss of virtue in my own. Since I am
not to see you from year to year, is there never an Englishman
who knows you well, who comes to America, and whom you can send
to me to answer all my questions? Health and love and joy to you
and yours.

--R.W. Emerson

XCVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 31 January, 1845

My Dear Carlyle,--Carey and Hart of Philadelphia, booksellers,
have lately proposed to buy the remainder of our Boston edition
of your _Miscellanies,_ or to give you a bonus for sanctioning an
edition of the same, which the