Be as glad as you have been.
You and I shall not know each other on this platform as long as
we have known. A correspondence even of twenty-five years should
not be disused unless through some fatal event. Life is too
short, and, with all our poetry and morals, too indigent to allow
such sacrifices. Eyes so old and wary, and which have learned to
look on so much, are gathering an hourly harvest,--and I cannot
spare what on noble terms is offered me.
With congratulations to Jane Carlyle on the grandeur of the Book,
Yours affectionately,
R.W. Emerson
Extract From Diary*
Here has come into the country, three or four months ago, a
_History of Frederick,_ infinitely the wittiest book that ever
was written,--a book that one would think the English people
would rise up in mass and thank the author for, by cordial
acclamation, and signify, by crowning him with oakleaves, their
joy that such a head existed among them, and sympathizing and
much-reading America would make a new treaty or send a Minister
Extraordinary to offer congratulation of honoring delight to
England, in acknowledgment of this donation,--a book holding so
many memorable and heroic facts, working directly on practice;
with new heroes, things unvoiced before;--the German Plutarch
(now that we have exhausted the Greek and Roman and British
Plutarchs), with a range, too, of thought and wisdom so large and
so elastic, not so much applying as inosculating to every need
and sensibility of man, that we do not read a stereotype page,
rather we see the eyes of the writer looking into ours, mark his
behavior, humming, chuckling, with under-tones and trumpet-tones
and shrugs, and long-commanding glances, stereoscoping every
figure that passes, and every hill, river, road, hummock, and
pebble in the long perspective.
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