behalf of my own poor generation; nay, I feel withal as if the
one hope of help for it consisted in the possibility of new
Cromwells and new Puritans: thus do the two centuries stand
related to me, the seventeenth _worthless_ except precisely in so
far as it can be made the nineteenth; and yet let anybody try
that enterprise! Heaven help me.--I believe at least that I
ought _to hold my tongue;_ more especially at present.

Thanks for asking me to write you a word in the _Dial._ Had such
a purpose struck me long ago, there have been many things passing
through my head,--march-marching as they ever do, in long drawn,
scandalous Falstaff-regiments (a man ashamed to be seen passing
through Coventry with such a set!)--some one of which, snatched
out of the ragged rank, and dressed and drilled a little, might
perhaps fitly have been saved from Chaos, and sent to the _Dial._
In future we shall be on the outlook. I love your _Dial,_ and
yet it is with a kind of shudder. You seem to me in danger of
dividing yourselves from the Fact of this present Universe, in
which alone, ugly as it is, can I find any anchorage, and soaring
away after Ideas, Beliefs, Revelations, and such like,--into
perilous altitudes, as I think; beyond the curve of perpetual
frost, for one thing! I know not how to utter what impression
you give me; take the above as some stamping of the fore-hoof.
Surely I could wish you _returned_ into your own poor nineteenth
century, its follies and maladies, its blind or half-blind, but
gigantic toilings, its laughter and its tears, and trying to
evolve in some measure the hidden Godlike that lies in it;--that
seems to me the kind of feat for literary men. Alas, it is so
easy to screw one's self up into high and ever higher altitudes
of Transcendentalism, and see nothing under one but the