said about your advertisement? I can’t think. — All was understood, except that you had said ‘I should put my name on the cover and announce myself as editor, only that I am not sure I can bind myself for so long as a year,’ and so when I saw the advertisement I was glad, and only so far surprised as that I had not felt sure you would do it. — How many tedious words!
“I think I shall like being here much and find the rest I need. The country is tolerably pretty, gentle, unobtrusive — within the house plain kindness, and generally a silence unbroken except by the sounds from the poultry, or the wind; to appreciate which blessing one should have lived half a year in a boarding-house with as infirm a head as mine, and none to ward off interruptions, sick or well.”
Emerson wrote thus to Carlyle (March 31, 1842) in regard to the final transfer of editorship to himself: —
“I should tell you that my friend Margaret Fuller who has edited our little ‘Dial’ with such dubious approbation on the part of you and other men, has suddenly decided a few days ago that she will edit it no more. The second volume was just closing; shall it live for a third year? You should know, that if its interior and spiritual life has been ill-fed, its outward and bibliopolic existence has been worse managed. Its publishers failed, its short list of subscribers became shorter, and it has never paid its laborious editor, who has been very generous of her time and labor, the smallest remuneration. Unhappily, to me alone could the question be put whether the little aspiring starveling should be reprieved for another year. I had not the cruelty to kill
