RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
448
Concord, April
Dear Margaret,
— Thanks
22, 1841.
for your kind so-
but though feeble, and of late feebler than have no dangerous complaints, nothing but ridiculously narrow limits, which if I overpass licitude,
—
ever, I
I
must pay for
As
it.
soon as
my
old friend the
south wind returns, the woods and fields and
my
Henry Thoreau is coming to live with me, and work with me in the garden, and Do you know the issue teach me to graft apples. garden will heal me.
of
my earlier
ity,
plans,
—
and a common
of
Mr. Alcott,
out that pastoral here, but save
chapter in
my
Memoirs. ... I
so quickly to the kernel
Cambridge
society
;
liberty, equal-
I will not write
table, etc. ? it
for the bucolical
am
sorry
we come
and through the kernel
of
but I think I do not know any
part of our American life which is so superficial. The Hoosiers, the speculators, the custom-house officers,
— to say nothing of the
much
fanatics,
—
interest
had a pocketful of money, I think I should go down the Ohio and up and down the Mississippi by way of antidote to what small us
more.
If I
remains of the Orientalism (so endemic in these to cast out, I parts) there may still be in me,
—
mean,
Europe by the passion for and our reverence for Cambridge, which
the passion for
America
;
only a part of our reverence for London, must be transferred across the Alleghany ridge. Yet I,
is
perverse, take an extreme pleasure in reading
Au-