"God enters by a private door into every individual."

"God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take
which you please,--you can never have both."

"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must
carry it with us, or we find it not."

But we cannot reconstruct the Hanging Gardens with a few bricks from
Babylon.

Emerson describes his mode of life in these years in a letter to
Carlyle, dated May 10, 1838.

"I occupy, or improve, as we Yankees say, two acres only of God's
earth; on which is my house, my kitchen-garden, my orchard of thirty
young trees, my empty barn. My house is now a very good one for
comfort, and abounding in room. Besides my house, I have, I believe,
$22,000, whose income in ordinary years is six per cent. I have no
other tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which
was last winter $800. Well, with this income, here at home, I am a
rich man. I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance. I have
food, warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go away from home, I am rich
no longer. I never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise
man, I suppose, ever was rich in the sense of freedom to spend,
because of the inundation of claims, so neither am I, who am not
wise. But at home, I am rich,--rich enough for ten brothers. My wife
Lidian is an incarnation of Christianity,--I call her Asia,--and
keeps my philosophy from Antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest,
most conservative of ladies, whose only exception to her universal
preference for old things is her son; my boy, a piece of love and
sunshine, well worth my watching from morning to night;--these, and
three domestic women, who cook, and sew and run for us, make all my
household. Here I sit and read and write, with very little system,
and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary
result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely
repellent particle."

A great sorrow visited Emerson and his household at this period of his
life. On the 30th of October, 1841, he wrote to Carlyle: "My little boy
is five years old to-day, and almost old enough to send you his love."

Three months later, on the 28th of February, 1842, he writes once
more:--

"My dear friend, you should have had this letter and these messages
by the last steamer; but when it sailed, my son,