Pray write,
therefore; all is lying ready here. Since you heard last, I
have got two Catalogues made out, approximately correct; one is
to lie here till the Bequest be executed; the other I thought of
sending to you against the day? This is my own invention in
regard to the affair since I wrote last. Approve of it, and you
shall have your copy by Book-post at once. "_Approximately_
correct"; absolutely I cannot get it to be. But I need not
doubt the Pious Purpose will be piously and even sacredly
fulfilled;--and your Catalogue will be a kind of evidence that it
is. Adieu, dear Emerson, till your Letter come.
Yours ever,
Thomas Carlyle
CLXXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle
Concord, 23 January, 1870*
My Dear Carlyle,--'T is a sad apology that I have to offer for
delays which no apology can retrieve. I received your first
letter with pure joy, but in the midst of extreme inefficiency.
I had suddenly yielded to a proposition of Fields & Co. to
manufacture a book for a given day. The book was planned, and
going on passably, when it was found better to divide the matter,
and separate, and postpone the purely literary portion (criticism
chiefly), and therefore to modify and swell the elected part.
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