------
* In the rough draft the following sentence comes in here "I
reckon myself a good beginning of a poet, very urgent and decided
in my bent, and in some coming millennium I shall yet sing."
---------

Little and Brown have just rendered me an account, by which it
appears that we are not quite so well off as was thought last
summer, when they said they had sold at auction the balance of
your books which had been lying unsold. It seems now that the
books supposed to be sold were not all taken, and are returned to
them; one hundred _Chartism,_ sixty-three _Past and Present._
Yet we are to have some eighty-three dollars ($83.68), which you
shall probably have by the next steamer.

Yours affectionately,
R.W. Emerson

CXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 2 March, 1847

Dear Emerson,--The Steamer goes tomorrow; I must, though in a
very dim condition, have a little word for you conveyed by it.
In the miscellaneous maw of that strange Steamer shall lie, among
other things, a friendly _word!_

Your very kind Letter lay waiting me here, some ten days ago;
doubly welcome, after so long a silence. We had been in
Hampshire, with the Barings, where we were last year;--some four
weeks or more; totally idle: our winter had been, and indeed
still is, unusually severe; my Wife's health in consequence was
sadly deranged; but this idleness, these Isle-of-Wight sea-
breezes, have brought matters well round again; so we cannot
grudge the visit or the idleness, which otherwise too might have
its uses. Alas, at this time my normal state is to be altogether
_idle,_ to look out upon a very lonely universe, full of grim
sorrow, full of splendor too; and not to know at all, for the
moment, on what side I am to attack it again!--I read your Book
of Poems all faithfully, at Bay House (our Hampshire quarters);
where the obstinate people,--with whom you are otherwise, in
prose, a first favorite,--foolishly _refused_ to let me read
aloud; foolishly, for I would have made it mostly all plain by
commentary:--so I had to read for myself; and can say, in spite
of my hard-heartedness, I did gain, though under impediments, a
real satisfaction and some tone of the Eternal Melodies sounding,
afar off, ever and anon, in my ear! This is fact; a truth in
Natural History; from which you are welcome to draw inferences.
A grand View of the Universe, everywhere the sound (unhappily
_far of,_ as it were) o