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* The allusion referred to is the following: "By the kindness of
a Scottish Hamburg merchant, whose name, known to the whole
mercantile world, he must not mention; but whose honorable
courtesy, now and before spontaneously manifested to him, a mere
literary stranger, he cannot soon forget,--the bulky Weissnichtwo
packet, with all its Custom-house seals, foreign hieroglyphs, and
miscellaneous tokens of travel, arrived here in perfect safety,
and free of cost."--_Sartor Resartus,_ Book I. ch. xi.

** An article by the Rev. N.L. Frothingham in the _Christian
Examiner._
----------

Your little azure-colored Nature gave me true satisfaction. I
read it, and then lent it about to all my acquaintance that had a
sense for such things; from whom a similar verdict always came
back. You say it is the first chapter of something greater. I
call it rather the Foundation and Ground-plan on which you may
build whatsoever of great and true has been given you to build.
It is the true Apocalypse, this when the "Open Secret" becomes
revealed to a man. I rejoice much in the glad serenity of soul
with which you look out on this wondrous Dwelling-place of yours
and mine--with an ear for the _Ewigen Melodien,_ which pipe in
the winds round us, and utter themselves forth in all sounds and
sights and things: not to be written down by gamut-machinery;
but which all right writing is a kind of attempt to write down.
You will see what the years will bring you. It is not one of
your smallest qualities in my mind, that you can wait so quietly
and let the years do their best. He that cannot keep himself
quiet is of a morbid nature; and the thing he yields us will be
like him in that, whatever else it be.

Miss Martineau (for I have seen her since I wrote) tells me you
"are the only man in America" who has quietly set himself down on
a competency to follow his own path, and do the work his own will
prescribes for him. Pity that you were the only one! But be
one, nevertheless; be the first, and there will come a second
and a third. It is a poor country where all men are _sold_ to
Mammon, and can make nothing but Railways and Bursts of
Parliamentary Eloquence! And yet your New England here too has
the upper hand of our Old England, of our Old Europe: we too are
sold to Mammon, soul, body, and spirit; but (mark that, I pray
you, with double pity) Mammon will not _pay_ us,--we, are "Two
Million three hundred thousand in Irelan