which remains to us at your age and mine. Nine or ten days will
bring you (and commonly with unexpected comfort and easements on
the way) to Boston. Every reading person in America holds you in
exceptional regard, and will rejoice in your arrival. They have
forgotten your scarlet sins before or during the war. I have
long ceased to apologize for or explain your savage sayings about
American or other republics or publics, and am willing that
anointed men bearing with them authentic charters shall be laws
to themselves as Plato willed. Genius is but a large infusion of
Deity, and so brings a prerogative all its own. It has a right
and duty to affront and amaze men by carrying out its perceptions
defiantly, knowing well that time and fate will verify and
explain what time and fate have through them said. We must not
suggest to Michel Angelo, or Machiavel, or Rabelais, or Voltaire,
or John Brown of Osawatomie (a great man), or Carlyle, how they
shall suppress their paradoxes and check their huge gait to keep
accurate step with the procession on the street sidewalk. They
are privileged persons, and may have their own swing for me.

I did not mean to chatter so much, but I wish you would come out
hither and read our possibilities now being daily disclosed, and
our actualities which are not nothing. I shall like to show you
my near neighbors, topographically or practically. A near
neighbor and friend, E. Rockwood Hoar, whom you saw in his youth,
is now an inestimable citizen in this State, and lately, in
President Grant's Cabinet, Attorney-General of the United States.
He lives in this town and carries it in his hand. Another is
John M. Forbes, a strictly private citizen, of great executive
ability, and noblest affections, a motive power and regulator
essential to our City, refusing all office, but impossible to