answered your former Letter,--acknowledging the manna-gift of the
L51, and other things; nor do I think the Letter can have been
lost, for I remember putting it into the Post-Office myself.
Today I am on the eve of an expedition into Suffolk, and full of
petty business: however, I will throw you one word, were it only
to lighten my own heart a little. You are a kind friend to me,
and a precious;--and when I mourn over the impotence of Human
Speech, and how each of us, speak or write as he will, has to
stand _dumb,_ cased up in his own unutterabilities, before his
unutterable Brother, I feel always as if Emerson were the man I
could soonest _try_ to speak with,--were I within reach of him!
Well; we must be content. A pen is a pen, and worth something;
though it expresses about as much of a _man's_ meaning perhaps as
the stamping of a hoof will express of a horse's meaning; a very
poor expression indeed!

---------
* This letter of 15th August is missing.
---------

Your bibliopolic advice about Cromwell or my next Book shall be
carefully attended, if I live ever to write another Book! But I
have again got down into primeval Night; and live alone and mute
with the _Manes,_ as you say; uncertain whether I shall ever
more see day. I am partly ashamed of myself; but cannot help
it. One of my grand difficulties I suspect to be that I cannot
write _two Books at once;_ cannot be in the seventeenth century
and in the nineteenth at one and the same moment; a feat which
excels even that of the Irishman's bird: "Nobody but a bird can
be in two places at once!" For my heart is sick and sore in