ssed small underground streams,--and lost one day's light;
then steamed up the Mississippi, five days, to Galena. In the
Upper Mississippi, you are always in a lake with many islands.

"The Far West" is the right name for these verdant deserts. On
all the shores, interminable silent forest. If you land, there
is prairie behind prairie, forest behind forest, sites of
nations, no nations. The raw bullion of nature; what we call
"moral" value not yet stamped on it. But in a thousand miles the
immense material values will show twenty or fifty Californias;
that a good ciphering head will make one where he is. Thus at
Pittsburg, on the Ohio, the "Iron" City, whither, from want of
railroads, few Yankees have penetrated, every acre of land has
three or four bottoms; first of rich soil; then nine feet of
bituminous coal; a little lower, fourteen feet of coal; then
iron, or salt; salt springs, with a valuable oil called
petroleum floating on their surface. Yet this acre sells for the
price of any tillage acre in Massachusetts; and, in a year, the
railroads will reach it, east and west.--I came home by the great
Northern Lakes and Niagara.

No books, a few lectures, each winter, I write and read. In the
spring, the abomination of our Fugitive Slave Bill drove me to
some writing and speech-making, without hope of effect, but to
clear my own skirts. I am sorry I did not print whilst it was
yet time. I am now told that the time will come again, more's
the pity. Now I am trying to make a sort of memoir of Margaret
Fuller, or my part in one;--for Channing and Ward are to do
theirs. Without either beauty or genius, she had a certain
wealth and generosity of nature which have left a kind of claim
on our consciences to build her a cairn. And this reminds me
that I am to write a note to Mazzini on this matter; and, as you
say you see him, you must charge yourself with delivering it.
What we do must be ended by October. You too are working for
Sterling. It is right and kind. I learned so much from the New
York _Tribune,_ and, a few days after, was on the point of
writing to you, provoked by a foolish paragraph which appeared in
Rufus Griswold's Journal, (New York,) purporting that R.W.E.
possessed important letters of Sterling, without which Thomas
Carlyle could not write the Life. What scrap of hearsay about
contents of Sterling's letters to me, or that I had letters, this
paltry journalist swelled into this pu