Mr. Willis insists on remaining out of Boston, but will do all that he can for his friends

GLENMARY, September 15, 1840

MY DEAR LONGFELLOW, I had thought it prob

able that I should see you here this summer. I was sorry to get the assurance that you were not to fly from your orbit of east wind. I wanted to have a talk with you. That same east wind, by the way, was the reason I did not see you while I was in Boston; for I devoted one afternoon to a drive to Cambridge, and on heading round from Brookline the pestilent bise met us full on the quarter, and Mrs. Willis declared she could not stand it. So I up helm for my sister's house in Brighton, and we finished the evening over a fire. I confess that I see everything, even my friends, through my bilious spectacles in Boston. I do not enjoy any thing or anybody within its abominable periphery of hills and salt-marshes. Even you seem not what you would at Glenmary; and I prefer Sumner seasick in a head-wind in the English Channel, to Sumner with his rosiest gills and reddest waistcoat in Boston. By the way, how is our agreeable friend; and have the nankeen-trousered Bostonians yet begun to qualify their admiration of him? I consider his advent a kind of experimentum crucis; and if they do turn and abuse him, they will certainly go to perdition for illiberality. There is no excuse for disliking Sumner. He bears his honors so meekly, and is so thoroughly a good fellow, that if they do not send him to Congress and love him forever, I will deny my cradle.

I am going to New York in a week or two, and one of my bringings back will be your Voices of the Night, of which I have only read the extracts in the newspapers. I see perfectly the line you are striking out for a renown,

Not Quite Merchant Enough

and it will succeed. Your severe, chaste, lofty-thoughted style of poetry will live a great deal longer than that which would be more salable and popular now; and if you preferred the money and the hurrah, I should be as sorry as I am to be obliged to do so myself. Still, I think you are not quite merchant enough with your poems after they are written, and about this I talked a great deal with Sumner, who will disgorge for you.

How, and what fashion of Benedick, is Felton? Him I should like to see too, on an unprejudiced potato-hill, — out of Boston, that is to say; and next year, if I am here, I will try what persuasion will do to get him and his wife, you and Sumner and Cleveland, at Glenmary in literary congress. I have built a new slice to my house, and have plenty of room for you all. Will you, seriously, talk of this and try to shape it out? Tell Felton I was highly gratified and obliged by the kind and flattering review of my poems in the North American. It has done me, I doubt not, great service; ça veut dire I can make better bargains with editors and publishers, about all I think worth minding in the way of popular opinion. Will you write me a long letter and tell me what you think of your own literary position, and whether a blast from "Under the Bridge" would make your topsails belly? I will express all the admiration I feel for your sweet poems, if you care a rush for it, — indeed, I think I shall do it whether you like it or no. God bless you, dear Longfellow! Believe me

Yours very faithfully,

N. P. WILLIS

Margaret Fuller urges Henry Thoreau to renewed

effort

18th October, 1841

Do not find the poem on the mountains improved by mere compression, though it might be by fusion and glow. Its merits to me are, a noble recognition of Nature, two or three manly thoughts, and, in one place, a plaintive music. The image of the ships does not please me originally. It illustrates the greater by the less, and affects me as when Byron compares the light on Jura to that of the dark eye of a woman. I cannot define my

position here, and a large class of readers would differ from me. As the poet goes on to

"Unhewn primeval timber,

For knees so stiff, for masts so limber,"

he seems to chase an image, already rather forced, into conceits.

Yet, now that I have some knowledge of the man, it seems there is no objection I could make to his lines (with the exception of such offenses against taste as the lines about the humors of the eye, as to which we are already agreed), which I would not make to himself. He is healthful, rare, of open eye, ready hand, and noble scope. He sets no limits to his life, nor to the invasions of nature ; he is not wilfully pragmatical, cautious, ascetic, or fantastical. But he is as yet a somewhat bare hill, which the warm gales of Spring have not yet visited. Thought lies too detached, truth is seen too much in detail; we can number and mark the substances imbedded in the rock. Thus his verses are startling as much as stern; the thought does not excuse its conscious existence by letting us see its relation with life; there is a want of fluent music. Yet what could a companion do at present, unless to tame the

Paradoxes

guardian of the Alps too early? Leave him at peace amid his native snows. He is friendly; he will find the generous office that shall educate him. It is not a soil for the citron and the rose, but for the whortleberry, the pine, or the heather.

The unfolding of affections, a wider and deeper human experience, the harmonizing influences of other natures, I will mould the man and melt his verse. He will seek thought less and find knowledge the more. I can have no advice or criticism for a person so sincere; but, if I give my impression of him, I will say, "He says too constantly of Nature, she is mine." She is not yours until you have been more hers. Seek the lotus, and take a draught of rapture. Say not so confidently, all places, all occasions are alike. This will never come true till you have found it false.

I do not know that I have more to say now; perhaps these words will say nothing to you. If intercourse should continue, perhaps a bridge may be made between two minds so widely apart; for I apprehended you in spirit, and you did not seem to mistake me so widely as most of your kind do. If you should find yourself inclined to write to me, as you thought you might, I dare say, many thoughts would be suggested to me; many have already, by seeing you from day to day. Will you finish the poem in your own way, and send it for the "Dial"? Leave out"And seem to milk the sky."

The image is too low; Mr. Emerson thought so too. Farewell! May truth be irradiated by Beauty! Let me know whether you go to the lonely hut, and write to me about Shakespeare, if you read him there. I have many thoughts about him, which I have never yet been led to express.

MARGARET F.

script

I

1st December [1841]

AM to blame for so long detaining your manuscript. But my thoughts have been so engaged that I have not found a suitable hour to reread it as I wished, till last night. This second reading only confirms my impression from the first. The essay is rich in thoughts, and I should be pained not to meet it again. But then, the thoughts seem to me so out of their natural order, that I cannot read it through without pain. I never once feel myself in a stream of thought, but seem to hear the grating of tools on the mosaic. It is true, as Mr. Emerson says, that essays not to be compared with this have found their way into the "Dial." But then these are more unassuming in their tone, and have an air of quiet good-breeding, which induces us to permit their presence. Yours is so rugged that it ought to be commanding..

...

William Wetmore Story praises the "Fable for Critics," but defends Margaret Fuller

(To James Russell Lowell)

ROME, March 21st, 1849

DEAR JIM,

"The Biglow Papers

MY our

I used to read to convulsed audiences at

weekly "at home" on Sunday evenings, giving them as well as I could the true Yankee note, and one evening I interpreted in the same tones one of them to the Brownings, who were quite as much amused and delighted as I.

The "Fable for Critics" is admirable and just what I