Gladly I
hear of the Carlylet--so they say--in the new Westminster.

---------
* This was Emerson's famous Oration before the Phi Beta Kappa
Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837, on "The American
Scholar." In his admirable essay on Thoreau,--an essay which
might serve as introduction and comment to the letters of Carlyle
and Emerson during these years,--Lowell speaks of the impression
made by this remarkable discourse. It "was an event without any
former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always
treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its
inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows
clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what
grim silence of foregone dissent! It was our Yankee version of a
lecture by Abelard, our Harvard parallel to the last public
appearances of Schelling."--_My Study Windows,_ p. 197
---------

XVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 2 November, 1837

My Dear Friend,--Mr. Charles Sumner, a lawyer of high standing
for his age, and editor or one editor of a journal called _The
Jurist,_ and withal a lover of your writings, tells me he is
going to Paris and thence to London, and sets out in a few days.
I cannot, of course, resist his request for a letter to you, nor
let pass the occasion of a greeting. Health, Joy, and Peace be
with you! I hope you sit still yet, and do not hastily meditate
new labors. Phidias need not be always tinkering. Sit still
like an Egyptian. Somebody told me the other day that your
friends here might have made a sum for the author by publishing
_Sartor_ themselves, instead of leaving it with a bookseller.
Instantly I wondered why I had never such a thought before, and
went straight to Boston, and have made a bargain with a
bookseller to print the _French Revolution._ It is to be printed
in two volumes of the size of our American _Sartor,_ one thousand
copies, the estimate making the cost of the book say (in dollars
and cents) $1.18 a copy, and the price $2.50. The bookseller
contracts with me to sell the book at a commission of twenty
percent on that selling price, allowing me however to take at
cost as many copies as I can find subscribers for. There is yet,
I believe, no other copy in the country than mine: so I gave him
the first volume, and the printing is begun. I shall take
care that your friends here shall know my contract with the
bookseller, and so shall give me their names. Then,