A NOTES FTER the publication of Nature, the first hint that appears of the collection by Mr. Emerson of his writings into a second book, occurs in the end of a letter to Mr. Alcott, written April 16, 1839, which Mr. Sanborn gives in his Memoir of Bronson Alcott: «I have been writing a little, and arranging old papers more, and by and by I hope to get a shapely book of Genesis.' In a letter written in April, 1840, to Carlyle, Mr. Emerson thus alludes to the Essays: "I am here at work now for a fortnight to spin some single cord out of my thousand and one strands of every color and texture that lie ravelled around me in old snarls. We need to be possessed with a mountainous conviction of the value of our advice to our contemporaries, if we will take such pains to find what that is. But no, it is the pleasure of the spinning that betrays poor spinners into the loss of so much good time. I shall work with the more diligence on this book-to-be of mine, that you inform me again and again that my penny tracts1 are still extant; nay, that beside friendly men, learned and poetic men read and even review them. I am like Scholasticus of the Greek Primer, who was ashamed to bring out so small a dead child before such grand people. Pygmalion shall try if he cannot fashion a better, — certainly a bigger." Four months later he tells of the problems at home, "a good deal of movement and tendency emerging into sight every day in church and state, in social modes and in letters. You will natu 1 Nature, and the various addresses, published at first separately in pamphlet form. rally ask me if I try my hand at the history of all this. No, not in the near and practical way in which they seem to invite. I incline to write philosophy, poetry, possibility anything but history. And yet this phantom of the next age limns himself sometimes so large and plain that every feature is apprehensible and challenges a painter. . . . I dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on every knowable in nature; but the arrangement loiters long, and I get a brick-kiln instead of a house." Soon after the coming in of the new year he sends word: "In a fortnight or three weeks my little raft will be afloat. Expect nothing more of my powers of construction, — no ship-building, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards and logs tied together." In his Journal he wrote, in January, 1841: "All my thoughts are foresters. I have scarce a day-dream on which the breath of the pines has not blown and their shadows waved. Shall I not therefore call my little book Forest Essays The book was published in March, 1841, in Boston, by James Munroe and Company. I Soon after Nature had appeared, Carlyle had written to his friend: "There is a man here called John Sterling, whom I love better than any one I have met with, since a certain sky-messenger alighted to me at Craigenputtock and vanished in the Blue again. . . . Well, and what then, cry you? Why then, this John Sterling has fallen overhead in love with a certain Waldo Emerson; that is all. He saw the little book Nature lying here; and, across a whole silva silvarum of prejudices, discerned what was in it, took it to his I Alluding to Emerson's first visit to him among the moors of Nithsdale in 1833. I wish, but heart, -and indeed into his pocket. . . This is the small piece of pleasant news, that two sky-messengers (such they were, both of them, to me) have met and recognized each other, and by God's blessing there shall one day be a trio of us; call you that nothing?" Sterling wrote to Emerson and a noble friendship resulted. Although they never met in the body, these friends had more in common with each other in their hope, their courage, and their desire for expression in poetry than either had with Carlyle. Sterling died in 1844. Emerson sent Sterling his Essays, saying, 66 They are not yet a fortnight old. I have written your name in a copy and sent it to Carlyle by the same steamer. scarce dare hope, you may find in it any thing of the pristine sacredness of thought. All thoughts are holy when they come floating up to us in magical newness from the hidden Life, and 'tis no wonder we are enamoured with these Muses and Graces, until, in our devotion to particular beauties and in our efforts at artificial disposition, we lose somewhat of our universal sense and the sovereign eye of Proportion. All sins, literary and æsthetic and scientific, as well as moral, grow out of unbelief at last. We must needs meddle ambitiously, and cannot quite trust that there is life, self-evolving and indestructible, but which cannot be hastened, at the heart of every physical and metaphysical fact. Yet how we thank and greet, almost adore the person who has once or twice in a lifetime treated any thing sublimely, and certified us that he beheld the Law. The silence and obscurity in which he acted are of no account, for every thing is equally related to the soul. "I certainly did not mean, when I took up this paper, to write an essay on Faith, and yet I am always willing to declare how indigent I think our poetry and all literature is become for want of that. My thought had only this scope, |