I should print it at once, nor do I think that you would incur any risk in doing so that you cannot well afford. It is very certain to have readers and debtors, here as well as there. The Dial is absurdly well known here. We at home, I think, are always a little ashamed of it, — I am, — and yet here it is spoken of with the utmost gravity, and I do not laugh. Carlyle writes me that he is reading Doomsday Book.

You tell me in your letter one odious circumstance, which we will dismiss from remembrance henceforward. Charles Lane instructed me, in London, to ask you to forward his Dials to him, which must be done, if you can find them. Three bound volumes are among his books in my library. The fourth volume is in unbound numbers at J. Munroe & Co.’s shop, received there in a parcel to my address, a day or two before I sailed, and which I forgot to carry to Concord. It must be claimed without delay. It is certainly there, — was opened by me and left; and they can inclose all four volumes to Chapman for me.

Well, I am glad the Pleasaunce at Walden suffered no more; but it is a great loss as it is, which years will not repair. I feel that I have balked you by the promise of a letter which ends in as good as none, but I write with counted minutes and a miscellany of things before me. Yours affectionately, R. W. E.

[On a separate sheet this message:]

Will Mr. Thoreau please to bear in mind that when there is good mortar in readiness Mr. Dean must be summoned to fit the air-tight stove to the chimney in the schoolroom ? — unless Mr. T. can do it with convenience himself.

Mr. Lane was the English owner of the farm in Harvard, where he lived with the Alcotts; and Emerson had the care of his property in America, now that he had gone back to England. In the letter which follows “Whipple” is E. P. Whipple, the essayist, then a popular lecturer, and the “traveling professor” is Agassiz. V. THOREAU TO EMERSON IN ENGLAND.

CONCORD, December 29, 1847.

MY DEAR FRIEND, — I thank you for your letter. I was very glad to get it; and I am glad again to write to you. However slow the steamer, no time intervenes between the writing and the reading of thoughts, but they come freshly to the most distant port. I am here still, and very glad to be here, and shall not trouble you with any complaints because I do not fill my place better. I have had many good hours in the chamber at the head of the stairs, — a solid time, it seems to me. Next going to give an account to the Lyceum of my expedition to Maine. Theodore Parker lectures to-night. We have had Whipple on Genius, — too weighty a subject for him, with his antithetical definitions new-vamped, — what it is, what it is not, but altogether what it is not; cuffing it this way and cuffing it that, as if it were an India-rubber ball. Really, it is a subject which should expand, expand, accumulate itself before the speaker’s eyes as he goes on, like the snowballs which the boys roll in the street; and when it stops, it should be so large that he cannot start it, but must leave it there. [H. N.] Hudson, too, has been here, with a dark shadow in the core of him, and his desperate wit, so much indebted to the surface of him, — wringing out his words and snapping them off like a dish-cloth; very remarkable, but not memorable.