he Professor makes
no more impression there than yet appears. I, with the most
affectionate wishes for Thomas Carlyle's fame, am mainly bent on
securing the medicinal virtues of his book for my young
neighbors. The good people think he overpraises Goethe. There I
give him up to their wrath. But I bid them mark his unsleeping
moral sentiment; that every other moralist occasionally nods,
becomes complaisant and traditional; but this man is without
interval on the side of equity and humanity! I am grieved for
you, O wise friend, that you cannot put in your own contemptuous
disclaimer of such puritanical pleas as are set up for you; but
each creature and Levite must do after his kind.

Yet do not imagine that I will hurt you in this unseen domain of
yours by any Boswellism. Every suffrage you get here is fairly
your own. Nobody is coaxed to admire you, and you have won
friends whom I should be proud to show you, and honorable women
not a few. And cannot you renew and confirm your suggestion
touching your appearance in this continent? Ah, if I could give
your intimation the binding force of an oracular word!--in a few
months, please God, at most, I shall have wife, house, and home
wherewith and wherein to return your former hospitality. And if
I could draw my prophet and his prophetess to brighten and
immortalize my lodge, and make it the window through which for a
summer you should look out on a field which Columbus and Berkeley
and Lafayette did not scorn to sow, my sun should shine clearer
and life would promise something better than peace. There is a
part of ethics, or in Schleiermacher's distribution it might be
physics, which possesses all attraction for me; to wit, the
compensations of the Universe, the equality and the coexistence
of action and reaction, that all prayers are granted, that every
debt is paid. And the skill with which the great All maketh
clean work as it goes along, leaves no rag, consumes its smoke,--
will I hope make a chapter in your thesis.

I intimated above that we aspire to have a work on the First
Philosophy in Boston. I hope, or wish rather. Those that are
forward in it debate upon the name. I doubt not in the least its
reception if the material that should fill it existed. Through
the thickest understanding will the reason throw itself instantly
into relation with the truth that is its object, whenever that
appears. But how seldom is the pure loadstone produced! Fai