is in my weeks and months. They are hardly
distinguished in memory other than as a running web out of a
loom, a bright stripe for day, a dark stripe for night, and, when
it goes faster, even these run together into endless gray... I
went lately to St. Louis and saw the Mississippi again. The
powers of the River, the insatiate craving for nations of men to
reap and cure its harvests, the conditions it imposes,--for it
yields to no engineering,--are interesting enough. The Prairie
exists to yield the greatest possible quantity of adipocere. For
corn makes pig, pig is the export of all the land, and you shall
see the instant dependence of aristocracy and civility on the fat
four legs. Workingmen, ability to do the work of the River,
abounded. Nothing higher was to be thought of. America is
incomplete. Room for us all, since it has not ended, nor given
sign of ending, in bard or hero. 'T is a wild democracy, the
riot of mediocrities, and none of your selfish Italies and
Englands, where an age sublimates into a genius, and the whole
population is made into Paddies to feed his porcelain veins, by
transfusion from their brick arteries. Our few fine persons are
apt to die. Horatio Greenough, a sculptor, whose tongue was far
cunninger in talk than his chisel to carve, and who inspired
great hopes, died two months ago at forty-seven years. Nature
has only so much vital force, and must dilute it, if it is to be
multiplied into millions. "The beautiful is never plentiful."
On the whole, I say to myself, that our conditions in America are
not easier or less expensive than the European. For the poor
scholar everywhere must be compromise or alternation, and, after
many remorses, the consoling himself that there has been
pecuniary honesty, and that things might have been worse. But
no; we must think much better things than these. Let Lazarus
believe that Heaven does not corrupt into maggots, and that
heroes do not succumb.

Clough is here, and comes to spend a Sunday with me, now and
then. He begins to have pupils, and, if his courage holds out,
will have as many as he wants.... I have written hundreds of
pages about England and America, and may send them to you
in print. And now be good and write me once more, and I think
I will never cease to write again. And give my homage to
Jane Carlyle.

Ever yours,
R.W. Emerson

CLII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 13 May, 1853

Dear Emerson,--The sigh