cause me to see
your face. But I seemed to read in _Mirabeau_ what you intimate
in your letter, that you will not come westward. Old England is
to find you out, and then the New will have no charm. For me it
will be the worst; for you, not. A man, a few men, cannot be to
you (with your ministering eyes) that which you should travel far
to find. Moreover, I observe that America looks, to those who
come hither, as unromantic and unexciting as the Dutch canals. I
see plainly that our Society, for the most part, is as bigoted to
the _respectabilities_ of religion and education as yours; that
there is no more appetite for a revelation here than elsewhere;
and the educated class are, of course, less fair-minded than
others. Yet, in the moments when my eyes are open, I see that
here are rich materials for the philosopher and poet, and, what
is more to your purpose as an artist, that we have had in these
parts no one philosopher or poet to put a sickle to the prairie
wheat. I have really never believed that you would do us that
crowning grace of coming hither, yet if God should be kinder to
us than our belief, I meant and mean to hold you fast in my
little meadows on the Musketaquid (now Concord) River, and show
you (as in this country we can anywhere) an America in miniature
in the April or November town meeting. Therein should you
conveniently study and master the whole of our hemispherical
politics reduced to a nutshell, and have a new version of
Oxenstiern's little wit; and yet be consoled by seeing that here
the farmers patient as their bulls of head-boards--provided for
them in relation to distant national objects, by kind editors of
newspapers--do yet their will, and a good will, in their own
parish. If a wise man would pass by New York, and be content to
sit still in this village a few months, he should get a thorough
native knowledge which no foreigner has yet acquired. So I leave
you with God, and if any oracle in the great Delphos should say
"Go," why fly to us instantly. Come and spend a year with me,
and see if I cannot respect your retirements.

I must love you for your interest in me and my way of life, and
the more that we only look for good-nature in the creative class.
They pay the tag of grandeur, and, attracted irresistibly to
make, their living is usually weak and hapless. But you are so
companionable--God has made you Man as well as Poet--that I
lament the three thousand miles of mounta