barn. My house is now a very good one for comfort, and abounding in room. Besides my house, I have, I believe, twenty-two thousand dollars, whose income in ordinary years is six per cent. I have no other tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which was last winter eight hundred dollars.

Well, with this income, here at home, I am a rich man. I stay at home, and go abroad, at my own instance. I have food, warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go away from home, I am rich no longer. I never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise man, I suppose, ever was rich in the sense of freedom to spend, because of the inundations of claims, so neither am I, who am not wise. But at home I am rich, — rich enough for ten brothers.

My wife Lidian is an incarnation of Christianity,- I call her Asia, and keeps my philosophy from Antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest, most conservative of ladies, whose only exception to her universal preference for old things is her son; my boy, a piece of love and sunshine, well worth my watching from morning to night; these, and three domestic women who cook and sew and run for us, make all my household. Here I sit and read and write, with very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle.

In summer, with the aid of a neighbor, I manage my garden; and a week ago I set out on the west side of my house forty young pine trees to protect me or my son from the wind of January. The ornament

of the place is the occasional presence of some ten or twelve persons, good and wise, who visit us in the course of the year.

7. ON THE DEATH OF HIS SON.

[From a letter to Carlyle, under date March 28, 1842.]

My dear friend, you should have had this letter and these messages by the last steamer; but when it sailed, my son, a perfect little boy of five years and three months, had ended his earthly life. You can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such a young child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a very rich man, and now the poorest of all. What would it avail to tell you anecdotes of a sweet and wonderful boy, such as we solace and sadden ourselves with at home every morning and evening? From a perfect health and as happy a life and as happy influences as ever child enjoyed, he was hurried out of my arms in three short days by scarlatina.

We have two babes yet,- one girl of three years, and one girl of three months and a week, but a promise like that boy's I shall never see. How often I have pleased myself that one day I should send to you this Morning Star of mine, and stay at home so gladly behind such a representative. I dare not fathom the invisible and untold, to inquire what relations to my departed ones I yet sustain. Lidian, the poor Lidian, moans at home by day and by night. You, too, will grieve for us, afar.

[Among the letters to Carlyle are occasional descriptions of his visits to different parts of the United States, while on his lecture tours. The following extracts will prove of interest.]

I.

I HAVE been something of a traveler the last year, and went down the Ohio River to its mouth; walked nine miles into and nine miles out of the Mammoth Cave, in Kentucky, — walked or sailed, for we crossed small underground streams, and lost one day's light; then steamed up the Mississippi, five days, to Galena. In the Upper Mississippi you are always in a lake with many islands. "The Far West" is the right name for these verdant deserts. On all the shores, interminable silent forest. If you land, there is prairie behind prairie, forest behind forest, sites of nations, no nations. The raw bullion of nature; what we call "moral" value not yet stamped on it. But in a thousand miles the immense material values will show twenty or fifty Californias; that a good ciphering head will make one where he is. Thus at Pittsburg, on the Ohio, the Iron City, whither, from want of railroads, few Yankees have penetrated, every acre of land has three or four bottoms; first of rich soil; then nine feet of bituminous coal; a little lower, fourteen feet of coal; then iron, or salt; salt springs, with a valuable oil called petroleum floating on their surface. Yet this acre sells for the price of any tillage acre in Massachusetts; and, in a year, the railroads will reach it, east

and west. I came home by the great Northern Lakes and Niagara.

II.

I went lately to St. Louis, and saw the Mississippi again. The powers of the river, the insatiate craving for nations of men to reap and cure its harvests, the conditions it imposes, for it yields to no engineering, are interesting enough. The prairie exists to yield the greatest possible quantity of adipocere. For corn makes pig, pig is the export of all the land, and you shall see the instant dependence of aristocracy and civility on the fat four-legs. Workingmen, ability to do the work of the river, abounded. Nothing higher was to be thought of.

America is incomplete. Room for us all, since it has not ended, nor given sign of ending, in bard or hero. 'Tis a wild democracy, the riot of mediocrities, and none of your selfish Italies and Englands, wherc an age sublimates into a genius, and the whole population is made into Paddies to feed his porcelain veins by transfusion from their brick arteries.

III.

California surprises with a geography, climate, vegetation, beasts, birds, fishes even, unlike ours; the land immense; the Pacific sea; steam brings the near neighborhood of Asia; and South America at your feet; the mountains reaching the altitude of Mont Blanc; the State in its six hundred miles of latitude producing all our Northern fruits, and also the fig, orange, and banana. But the climate chiefly surprised me. The almanac

said April, but the day said June; and day after day for six weeks, uninterrupted sunshine. November and December are the rainy months. The whole country was covered with flowers, and all of them unknown. to us except in greenhouses. Every bird that I know at home is represented here, but in gayer plumes.

On the plains we saw multitudes of antelopes, hares, gophers, even elks, and one pair of wolves on the plains; the grizzly bear, only in a cage. We crossed one region of the buffalo, but only saw one captive. We found Indians at every railroad station, the squaws and pappooses begging; and the "bucks," as they wickedly call them, lounging. On our way out, we left the Pacific Railroad for twenty-four hours to visit Salt Lake; called on Brigham Young, -just seventy years old, who received us with quiet, uncommitting courtesy, at first; a strong-built, self-possessed, sufficient man, with plain manners. He took early occasion to remark that "the one-man-power really meant allmen's-power." Our interview was peaceable enough, and rather mended my impression of the man; and, after our visit, I read in the Deseret newspaper his speech to his people on the previous Sunday. avoided religion, but was full of Franklinian good sense. In one point, he says, "Your fear of the Indians is nonsense. The Indians like the white men's food. Feed them well, and they will surely die." He is clearly a sufficient ruler, and perhaps civilizer of his kingdom of blockheads ad interim; but I found that the San Franciscans believe that this exceptional power cannot survive Brigham.

It