University of Virginia Library

—In a recent London sale was a letter from Carlyle on a lecture by Emerson that had been sent him, in which he says:—

Thanks for your gift of Emerson's lecture. Mr. Ballantyne had already sent me two copies; that was my first sight of the performance. It is an excellent discourse, greatly wanted on both sides of the Atlantic, and cannot be too widely circulated. Probably you are not aware that in New England a certain set of persons, grounding themselves on these ideas of Emerson's, are already about renouncing this miserable humbug of a world altogether, and retiring into the rural wilderness, to live there exclusively upon vegetables raised by their own digging. Three hours' daily work they say will produce a man sufficient vegetables, and he can live there according to his own mind, leaving the world to live according to its. An American was here lately, as an express missionary of all that, working for recruits, for proselytes; naturally finding none. I was obliged to express my total, deep, irreclaimable dissent from the whole vegetable concern, not without great offense to the missionary, and that, perhaps, is the reason why he sent me no American copy of this lecture. Emerson does not yet go into vegetables, into rural hermitship; and we hope never will.