d. I should be well content to receive
one of these stringent epistles of bark and steel and mellow wine
with every day's post, but as there is no hope that more will be
sent without my writing to signify that these have come, I hereby
certify that I love you well and prize all your messages. I read
with special interest what you say of these English studies, and
I doubt not the Book is in steady progress again. We shall see
what change the changed position of the author will make in the
book. The first _History_ expected its public; the second is
written to an expecting people. The tone of the first was
proud,--to defiance; we will see if applauses have mitigated the
master's temper. This time he has a hero, and we shall have a
sort of standard to try, by the hero who fights, the hero who
writes. Well; may grand and friendly spirits assist the work in
all hours; may impulses and presences from that profound world
which makes and embraces the whole of humanity, keep your feet on
the Mount of Vision which commands the Centuries, and the book
shall be an indispensable Benefit to men, which is the surest
fame. Let me know all that can be told of your progress in it.
You shall see in the last _Dial_ a certain shadow or mask of
yours, "another Richmond," who has read your lectures and
profited thereby.* Alcott sent me the paper from London, but I
do not know the name of the writer.

As for Alcott, you have discharged your conscience of him
manfully and knightly; I absolve you well... He is a great man
and was made for what is greatest, but I now fear that he has
already touched what best he can, and through his more than a
prophet's egotism, and the absence of all useful reconciling
talents, will bring nothing to pass, and be but a voice in the
wilderness. As you do not seem to have seen in him his pure and
noble intellect, I fear that it lies under some new and denser
clouds.

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* An article on Cromwell, in the _Dial_ for October, 1842.
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For the _Dial_ and its sins, I have no defence to set up. We
write as we can, and we know very little about it. If the
direction of these speculations is to be deplored, it is yet a
fact for literary history, that all the bright boys and girls in
New England, quite ignorant of each other, take the world so, and
come and make confession to fathers and mothers,--the boys that
they do not wish to go into trade, the girls that they do not
like morning c