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"The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II."


Miss Bacon wrote me in joyful fulness of the cordial kindness and
aid she had found at your hands, and at your wife's; and I have
never thanked you, and much less acknowledged her copious
letter,--copious with desired details. Clough, too, wrote about
you, and I have not written to him since his return to England.
You will see how total is my ossification. Meantime I have
nothing to tell you that can explain this mild palsy. I worked
for a time on my English Notes with a view of printing, but was
forced to leave them to go read some lectures in Philadelphia and
some Western towns. I went out Northwest to great countries
which I had not visited before; rode one day, fault of broken
railroads, in a sleigh, sixty-five miles through the snow, by
Lake Michigan, (seeing how prairies and oak-openings look in
winter,) to reach Milwaukee; "the world there was done up in
large lots," as a settler told me. The farmer, as he is now a
colonist and has drawn from his local necessities great doses of
energy, is interesting, and makes the heroic age for Wisconsin.


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