all
literature, which the trifles of each day open. Our doing seems
to be a gaudy screen or popinjay to divert the eye from our
nondoing. I wish, too, you could know my friends here. A man
named Bronson Alcott is a majestic soul, with whom conversation
is possible. He is capable of truth, and gives me the same glad
astonishment that he should exist which the world does.

--------
* Collins and Walsingham, two characters in _The Onyx Ring,_ are
partly drawn, not very felicitously, from Carlyle and Goethe. In
his _Life of Sterling,_ Carlyle says of the story: "A tale still
worth reading, in which, among the imaginary characters, various
friends of Sterling's are shadowed forth not always in the truest
manner." It is reprinted in the second volume of Sterling's
Essays and Tales, edited by Julius Hare.
---------

As I hear not yet of your reception of the bill of exchange,
which went by the "Royal William" in January, I enclose the
duplicate. And now all success to the Lectures of April or May!
A new Kingdom with new extravagances of power and splendor I
know. Unless you can keep your own secret better in _Rahel,_
&c., you must not give it me to keep. The London _Sartor_
arrived in my hands March 5th, dated the 15th of November, so
long is the way from Kennet to Little & Co. The book is welcome,
and awakens a sort of nepotism in me,--my brother's child.

--R.W. Emerson

I rejoice in the good accounts you give me of your household; in
your wife's health; in your brother's position. My wife wishes
to be affectionately remembered to you and yours. And the lady
must continue to love her _old_ Transatlantic friend.

XXXV. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 19 March, 1839

My Dear Friend,--Only last Saturday I despatched a letter to you
containing a duplicate of the bill of exchange sent in January,
and all the facts I knew of our books; and now comes to me a
note from Wheeler, at Cambridge, saying that the printers, on
reckoning up their amount of copy, find that nowise can they make
450 pages per volume, as they have promised, for these two last
of the _Miscellanies._ They end the third volume with page 390,
and they have not but 350 or less pages for the fourth. They
ask, What shall be done? Nothing is known to me but to give them
_Rahel,_ though I grudge it, for I vastly prefer to end with
_Scott._ _Rahel,_ I fancy, cost you no night and no morning,
but was wr