yours.

I had your letter long before your book. Very good work you have
done in your lifetime, and very generously you adorn and cheer
this pilgrimage of mine by your love. I find my highest prayer
granted in calling a just and wise man my friend. Your profuse
benefaction of genius in so few years makes me feel very poor and
useless. I see that I must go on trust to you and to all the
brave for some longer time, hoping yet to prove one day my truth
and love. There are in this country so few scholars, that the
services of each studious person are needed to do what he can
for the circulation of thoughts, to the end of making some
counterweight to the money force, and to give such food as he may
to the nigh starving youth. So I religiously read lectures every
winter, and at other times whenever summoned. Last year, "the
Philosophy of History," twelve lectures; and now I meditate a
course on what I call "Ethics." I peddle out all the wit I can
gather from Time or from Nature, and am pained at heart to see
how thankfully that little is received.

Write to me, good friend, tell me if you went to Scotland,--what
you do, and will do,--tell me that your wife is strong and well
again as when I saw her at Craigenputtock. I desire to be
affectionately remembered to her. Tell me when you will come
hither. I called together a little club a week ago, who spent a
day with me,--counting fifteen souls,--each one of whom warmly
loves you. So if the _French Revolution_ does not convert the
"dull public" of your native Nineveh, I see not but you must
shake their dust from your shoes and cross the Atlantic to a New
England. Yours in love and honor.

--R. Waldo Emerson

May I trouble you with a commission when you are in the City?
You mention being at the shop of Rich in Red-Lion Square. Will
you say to him that he sent me some books two or three years ago
without any account of prices annexed? I wrote him once myself,
once through S. Burdett, bookseller, and since through C.P.
Curtis, Esq., who professes to be his attorney in Boston,--three
times,--to ask for this account. No answer has ever come. I
wish he would send me the account, that I may settle it. If he
persist in his self-denying contumacy, I think you may
immortalize him as a bookseller of the gods.

I shall send you an Oration presently, delivered before a
literary society here, which is now being printed.*