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.

In summer, with the aid of a neighbor, I manage my garden; and a
week ago I set out on the west side of my house forty young pine
trees to protect me or my son from the wind of January. The
ornament of the place is the occasional presence of some ten or
twelve persons, good and wise, who visit us in the course of the
year.--But my story is too long already. God grant that you will
come and bring that blessed wife, whose protracted illness we
heartily grieve to learn, and whom a voyage and my wife's and my
mother's nursing would in less than a twelvemonth restore to
blooming health. My wife sends to her this message: "Come, and
I will be to you a sister." What have you to do with Italy?
Your genius tendeth to the New, to the West. Come and live with
me a year, and if you do not like New England well enough to
stay, one of these years (when the _History_ has passed its ten
editions, and been translated into as many languages) I will come
and dwell with you.

I gladly hear what you say of Sterling. I am foolish enough to
be delighted with being an object of kindness to a man I have
never seen, and who has not seen me. I have not yet got the
_Blackwood_ for March, which I long to see, but the other three
papers I have read with great satisfaction. They lie here on my
table. But he must get well.

As to Miss Martineau, I know not well what to say. Meaning to do
me a signal kindness (and a kindness quite out of all measure of
justice) she does me a great annoyance,--to take away from me my
privacy and thrust me before my time (if ever there be a time)
into the arena of the gladiators to be stared at. I was ashamed
to read, and am ashamed to remember. Yet, as you see her, I
would not be wanting in gratitu