This so astonishing reception of Teufelsdrockh in your New England circle seems to me not only astonishing, but questionable; not, however, to be quarreled with. I may say: If the New. England cup is dangerously sweet, there are here in Old England whole antiseptic floods of good hop-decoction; therein let it mingle; work wholesomely towards what clear benefit it can. Your young ones too, as all exaggeration is transient, and exaggerated love almost itself a blessing, will get through it without damage. As for Fraser, however, the idea of a new Edition is frightful to him; or rather ludicrous, unimaginable. Of him no man has inquired for a Sartor: in his whole wonderful world of Tory Pamphleteers, Conservative Younger-brothers, Regent-Street Loungers, Crockford Gamblers, Irish Jesuits, drunken Reporters, and miscellaneous unclean persons (whom nitre and much soap will not wash clean), not a soul has expressed the smallest wish that way. He shrieks at the idea. Accordingly I realized these four copies from [him,] all he will surrender; and can do no more. Take them with my blessing. I beg you will present one to the honorablest of those "honorable women"; say to her that her (unknown) image as she reads shall be to me a bright faultless vision, textured out of mere sunbeams; to be loved and worshiped; the best of all Transatlantic women! Do at any rate, in a more business like style, offer my respectful regards to Dr. Channing, whom certainly I could not count on for a reader, or other than a grieved condemnatory one; for I reckoned tolerance had its limits. His own faithful, long-continued striving towards what is Best, I knew and honored; that he will let me go my own way thitherward, with a God-speed from him, is surely a new honor to us both.

Finally, on behalf of the British world (which is not all contained in Fraser's shop) I should tell you that various persons, some of them in a dialect not to be doubted of, have privately expressed their recognition of this poor Rhapsody, the best the poor Clothes-Professor could produce in the circumstances; nay, I have Scottish Presbyterian Elders who read, and thank. So true is what you say about the aptitude of all natural hearts for receiving what is from the heart spoken to them. As face answereth to face! Brother, if thou wish me to believe, do thou thyself believe first: this is as true as that of the flere and dolendum; perhaps truer. Wherefore, putting all things together, cannot I feel that I have washed my hands of this business in a quite tolerable manner? Let a man be thankful; and on the whole go along, while he has strength left to go.

This Boston Transcendentalist, whatever the fate or merit of it prove to be, is surely an interesting symptom. There must be things not dreamt of, over in that Transoceanic Parish! I shall cordially wish well to this thing; and hail it as the sure forerunner of things better. The Visible becomes the Bestial when it rests not on the Invisible. Innumerable tumults of Metaphysic must be struggled through (whole generations perishing by the way), and at last Transcendentalism evolve itself (if I construe aright), as the Euthanasia of Metaphysic altogether. May it be sure, may it be speedy! Thou shalt open thy eyes, O Son of Adam; thou shalt look, and not forever jargon about laws of Optics and the making of spectacles! For myself, I rejoice very much that I seem to be flinging aside innumerable sets of spectacles (could I but lay them aside,—with gentleness!) and hope one day actually to see a thing or two. Man lives by Belief (as it was well written of old); by logic he can only at best long to live. Oh, I am dreadfully, afflicted with Logic here, and wish often (in my haste) that I had the besom of destruction to lay to it for a little!

"Why? and WHEREFORE? God wot, simply THEREFORE! Ask not WHY; 't is SITH thou hast to care for."

Since I wrote last to you, (which seems some three months ago,) there has a great mischance befallen me: the saddest, I think, of the kind called Accidents I ever had to front. By dint of continual endeavor for many weary weeks, I had got the first volume of that miserable French Revolution rather handsomely finished: from amid infinite contradictions I felt as if my head were fairly above water, and I could go on writing my poor Book, defying the Devil and the World, with a certain degree of assurance, and even of joy. A Friend borrowed this volume of Manuscript,—a kind Friend but a careless one,—to write notes on it, which he was well qualified to do. One evening about two months ago he came in on us, "distraction (literally) in his aspect"; the Manuscript, left carelessly out, had been torn up as waste paper, and all but three or four tatters was clean gone! I could not complain, or the poor man seemed as if he would have shot himself: we had to gather ourselves together, and show a smooth front to it; which happily, though difficult, was not impossible to do. I began again at the beginning; to such a wretched paralyzing torpedo of a task as my hand never found to do: at which I have worn myself these two months to the hue of saffron, to the humor of incipient desperation; and now, four days ago, perceiving well that I was like a man swimming in an element that grew ever rarer, till at last it became vacuum (think of that!) I with a new effort of self-denial sealed up all the paper fragments, and said to myself: In this mood thou makest no way, writest nothing that requires not to be erased again; lay it by for one complete week! And so it lies, under lock and key. I have digested the whole misery; I say, if thou canst never write this thing, why then never do write it: God's Universe will go along better—without it. My Belief in a special Providence grows yearly stronger, unsubduable, impregnable: however, you see all the mad increase of entanglement I have got to strive with, and will pity me in it. Bodily exhaustion (and "Diana in the shape of bile")* I will at least try to exclude from the controversy. By God's blessing, perhaps the Book shall yet be written; but I find it will not do, by sheer direct force; only by gentler side-methods. I have much else to write too: I feel often as if with one year of health and peace I could write something considerable;—the image of which sails dim and great through my head. Which year of health and peace, God, if He see meet, will give me yet; or withhold from me, as shall be for the best.

————- * This allusion to Diana as an obstruction was a favorite one with Carlyle. "Sir Hudibras, according to Butler, was about to do a dreadful homicide,—an all-important catastrophe,—and had drawn his pistol with that full intent, and would decidedly have done it, had not, says Butler, 'Diana in the shape of rust' imperatively intervened. A miracle she has occasionally wrought upon me in other shapes." So wrote Carlyle in a letter in 1874. ————-

I have dwelt and swum now for about a year in this World-Maelstrom of London; with much pain, which however has given me many thoughts, more than a counterbalance for that. Hitherto there is no outlook, but confusion, darkness, innumerable things against which a man must "set his face like a flint." Madness rules the world, as it has generally done: one cannot, unhappily, without loss, say to it, Rule then; and yet must say it.—However, in two months more I expect my good Brother from Italy (a brave fellow, who is a great comfort to me); we are then for Scotland to gather a little health, to consider ourselves a little. I must have this Book done before anything else will prosper with me.

Your American Pamphlets got to hand only a few days ago; worthy old Rich had them not originally; seemed since to have been oblivious, out of Town, perhaps unwell. I called one day, and unearthed them. Those papers you marked I have read. Genuine endeavor; which may the Heavens forward!—In this poor Country all is swallowed up in the barren Chaos of Politics: Ministries tumbled out, Ministries tumbled in; all things (a fearful substratum of "Ignorance and Hunger" weltering and heaving under them) apparently in rapid progress towards—the melting-pot. There will be news from England by and by: many things have reached their term; Destiny "with lame foot" has overtaken them, and there will be a reckoning. O blessed are you where, what jargoning soever there be at Washington, the poor man (ungoverned can govern himself) shoulders his age, and walks into the Western Woods, sure of a nourishing Earth and an overarching Sky! It is verily the Door of Hope to distracted Europe; which otherwise I should see crumbling down into blackness of darkness.—That too shall be for good.

I wish I had anything to send you besides these four poor Pamphlets; but I fear there is nothing going. Our Ex-Chancellor has been promulgating triticalities (significant as novelties, when he with his wig and lordhood utters them) against the Aristocracy; whereat the upper circles are terribly scandalized. In Literature, except a promised or obtained (but to me still unknown) volume of Wordsworth, nothing nameworthy doing.—Did I tell you that I saw Wordsworth this winter? Twice, at considerable length; with almost no disappointment. He is a natural man (which means whole immensities here and now); flows like a natural well yielding mere wholesomeness,—though, as it would not but seem to me, in small quantity, and astonishingly diluted. Franker utterance of mere garrulities and even platitudes I never heard from any man; at least never, whom I could honor for uttering them. I am thankful for Wordsworth; as in great darkness and perpetual sky-rockets and coruscations, one were for the smallest clear-burning farthing candle. Southey also I saw; a far cleverer man in speech, yet a considerably smaller man. Shovel-hatted; the shovel-hat is grown to him: one must take him as he is.

The second leaf is done; I must not venture on another. God bless you, my worthy Friend; you and her who is to be yours! My Wife bids me send heartiest wishes and regards from her too across the Sea. Perhaps we shall all meet one another some day, —if not Here, then Yonder!

Faithfully always, T. Carlyle



VIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 27 June, 1835

My Dear Friend,—Your very kind Letter has been in my hand these four weeks,—the subject of much meditation, which has not yet cleared itself into anything like a definite practical issue. Indeed, the conditions of the case are still not wholly before me: for if the American side of it, thanks to your perspicuous minuteness, is now tolerably plain, the European side continues dubious, too dim for a decision. So much in my own position here is vague, not to be measured; then there is a Brother, coming home to me from Italy, almost daily expected now; whose ulterior resolutions cannot but be influential on mine; for we are Brothers in the old good sense, and have one heart and one interest and object, and even one purse; and Jack is a good man, for whom I daily thank Heaven, as for one of its principal mercies. He is Traveling Physician to the Countess of Clare, well entreated by her and hers; but, I think, weary of that inane element of "the English Abroad," and as good as determined to have done with it; to seek work (he sees not well how), if possible, with wages; but even almost without, or with the lowest endurable, if need be. Work and wages: the two prime necessities of man! It is pity they should ever be disjoined; yet of the two, if one must, in this mad Earth, be dispensed with, it is really wise to say at all hazards, Be it the wages then. This Brother (if the Heavens have been kind to me) must be in Paris one of these days; then here speedily; and "the House must resolve itself into a Committee"—of ways and means. Add to all this, that I myself have been and am one of the stupidest of living men; in one of my vacant, interlunar conditions, unfit for deciding on anything: were I to give you my actual view of this case, it were a view such as Satan had from the pavilion of the Anarch old. Alas! it is all too like Chaos: confusion of dense and rare: I also know what it is to drop plumb, fluttering my pennons vain,—for a series of weeks.

One point only is clear: that you, my Friend, are very friendly to me; that New England is as much my country and home as Old England. Very singular and very pleasant it is to me to feel as if I had a house of my own in that far country: so many leagues and geographical degrees of wild-weltering "unfruitful brine"; and then the hospitable hearth and the smiles of brethren awaiting one there! What with railways, steamships, printing presses, it has surely become a most monstrous "tissue," this life of ours; if evil and confusion in the one Hemisphere, then good and order in the other, a man knows not how: and so it rustles forth, immeasurable, from "that roaring Loom of Time,"—miraculous ever as of old! To Ralph Waldo Emerson, however, and those that love me as he, be thanks always, and a sure place in the sanctuary of the mind. Long shall we remember that Autumn Sunday that landed him (out of Infinite Space) on the Craigenputtock wilderness, not to leave us as he found us. My Wife says, whatever I decide on, I cannot thank you too heartily;—which really is very sound doctrine. I write to tell you so much; and that you shall hear from me again when there is more to tell.

It does seem next to certain to me that I could preach a very considerable quantity of things from that Boston Pulpit, such as it is,—were I once fairly started. If so, what an unspeakable relief were it too! Of the whole mountain of miseries one grumbles at in this life, the central and parent one, as I often say, is that you cannot utter yourself. The poor soul sits struggling, impatient, longing vehemently out towards all corners of the Universe, and cannot get its hest delivered, not even so far as the voice might do it. Imprisoned, enchanted, like the Arabian Prince with half his body marble: it is really bad work. Then comes bodily sickness; to act and react, and double the imbroglio. Till at last, I suppose, one does rise, like Eliphaz the Temanite; states that his inner man is bursting (as if filled with carbonic acid and new wine), that by the favor of Heaven he will speak a word or two. Would it were come so far,— if it be ever to come!

On the whole I think the odds are that I shall some time or other get over to you; but that for this winter I ought not to go. My London expedition is not decided hitherto; I have begun various relations and arrangements, which it were questionable to cut short so soon. That beggarly Book, were there nothing else, hampers me every way. To fling it once for all into the fire were perhaps the best; yet I grudge to do that. To finish it, on the other hand, is denied me for the present, or even so much as to work at it. What am I to do? When my Brother arrives, we go all back to Scotland for some weeks: there, in seclusion, with such calmness as I can find or create, the plan for the winter must be settled. You shall hear from me then; let us hope something more reasonable than I can write at present. For about a month I have gone to and fro utterly idle: understand that, and I need explain no more. The wearied machine refused to be urged any farther; after long spasmodic struggling comes collapse. The burning of that wretched Manuscript has really been a sore business for me. Nevertheless that too shall clear itself, and prove a favor of the Upper Powers: tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new! This monstrous London has taught me several things during the past year; for if its Wisdom be of the most uninstructive ever heard of by that name of wisdom, its Folly abounds with lessons,—which one ought to learn. I feel (with my burnt manuscript) as if defeated in this campaign; defeated, yet not altogether disgraced. As the great Fritz said, when the battle had gone against him, "Another time we will do better."

As to Literature, Politics, and the whole multiplex aspect of existence here, expect me not to say one word. We are a singular people, in a singular condition. Not many nights ago, in one of those phenomenal assemblages named routs, whither we had gone to see the countenance of O'Connell and Company (the Tail was a Peacock's tail, with blonde muslin women and heroic Parliamentary men), one of the company, a "distinguished female" (as we call them), informed my Wife "O'Connell was the master-spirit of this age." If so, then for what we have received let us be thankful, —and enjoy it without criticism.—It often painfully seems to me as if much were coming fast to a crisis here; as if the crown-wheel had given way, and the whole horologe were rushing rapidly down, down, to its end! Wreckage is swift; rebuilding is slow and distant. Happily another than we has charge of it.

My new American Friends have come and gone. Barnard went off northward some fortnight ago, furnished with such guidance and furtherance as I could give him. Professor Longfellow went about the same time; to Sweden, then to Berlin and Germany: we saw him twice or thrice, and his ladies, with great pleasure; as one sees worthy souls from a far country, who cannot abide with you, who throw you a kind greeting as they pass. I inquired considerably about Concord, and a certain man there; one of the fair pilgrims told me several comfortable things. By the bye, how very good you are, in regard to this of Unitarianism! I declare, I am ashamed of my intolerance:—and yet you have ceased to be a Teacher of theirs, have you not? I mean to address you this time by the secular title of Esquire; as if I liked you better so. But truly, in black clothes or in white, by this style or by that, the man himself can never be other than welcome to me. You will further allow me to fancy that you are now wedded; and offer our united congratulations and kindest good wishes to that new fair Friend of ours, whom one day we shall surely know more of,—if the Fates smile.

My sheet is ending, and I must not burden you with double postage for such stuff as this. By dint of some inquiry I have learnt the law of the American Letter-carrying; and I now mention it for our mutual benefit. There are from New York to London three packets monthly (on the 1st, on the 10th, on the 20th); the masters of these carry Letters gratis for all men; and put the same into the Post-Office; there are some pence charged on the score of "Ship-letter" there, and after that, the regular postage of the country, if the Letter has to go farther. I put this, for example, into a place called North and South American Coffee-house in the City here, and pay twopence for it, and it flies. Doubtless there is some similar receiving-house with its "leather bag" somewhere in New York, and fixed days (probably the same as our days) for emptying, or rather for tying and despatching, said leather bag: if you deal with the London Packets (so long as I am here) in preference to the Liverpool ones, it will all be well. As for the next Letter, (if you write as I hope you may before hearing from me again,) pray direct it, "Care of John Mill, Esq., India House, London"; and he will forward it directly, should I even be still absent in the North.—Now will you write? and pray write something about yourself. We both love you here, and send you all good prayers. Vale faveque!

Yours ever, T. Carlyle



IX. Emerson to Carlyle*

Concord, 7 October, 1835

My Dear Friend,—Please God I will never again sit six weeks of this short human life over a letter of yours without answering it.

—————- * The original of this letter is missing; what is printed here is from the rough draft. —————-

I received in August your letter of June, and just then hearing that a lady, a little lady with a mighty heart, Mrs. Child,* whom I scarcely know but do much respect, was about to visit England (invited thither for work's sake by the African or Abolition Society) and that she begged an introduction to you, I used the occasion to say the godsend was come, and that I would acknowledge it as soon as three then impending tasks were ended. I have now learned that Mrs. Child was detained for weeks in New York and did not sail. Only last night I received your letter written in May, with the four copies of the Sartor, which by a strange oversight have been lying weeks, probably months, in the Custom-House. On such provocation I can sit still no longer.

—————— * The excellent Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, whose romance of Philothea was published in this year, 1835.

"If her heart at high floods swamps her brain now and then, 'T is but richer for that when the tide ebbs agen."

says Lowell, in his Fable for Critics. —————-

The three tasks were, a literary address; a historical discourse on the two-hundredth anniversary of our little town of Concord* (my first adventure in print, which I shall send you); the third, my marriage, now happily consummated. All three, from the least to the greatest, trod so fast upon each other's heel as to leave me, who am a slow and awkward workman, no interstice big enough for a letter that should hope to convey any information. Again I waited that the Discourse might go in his new jacket to show how busy I had been, but the creeping country press has not dressed it yet. Now congratulate me, my friend, as indeed you have already done, that I live with my wife in my own house, waiting on the good future. The house is not large, but convenient and very elastic. The more hearts (specially great hearts) it holds, the better it looks and feels. I have not had so much leisure yet but that the fact of having ample space to spread my books and blotted paper is still gratifying. So know now that your rooms in America wait for you, and that my wife is making ready a closet for Mrs. Carlyle.

————— * "A Historical Discourse, delivered before the Citizens of Concord, 12th September, 1835, on the Second Centennial Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Town. By Ralph Waldo Emerson. Published by Request. Concord: G.F. Bemis, Printer. 1835." 8vo, pp. 52.—A discourse worthy of the author and of the town. It is reprinted in the eleventh volume of Emerson's Works, Boston, 1883. —————-

I could cry at the disaster that has befallen you in the loss of the book. My brother Charles says the only thing the friend could do on such an occasion was to shoot himself, and wishes to know if he have done so. Such mischance might well quicken one's curiosity to know what Oversight there is of us, and I greet you well upon your faith and the resolution issuing out of it. You have certainly found a right manly consolation, and can afford to faint and rest a month or two on the laurels of such endeavor. I trust ere this you have re-collected the entire creation out of the secret cells where, under the smiles of every Muse, it first took life. Believe, when you are weary, that you who stimulate and rejoice virtuous young men do not write a line in vain. And whatever betide us in the inexorable future, what is better than to have awaked in many men the sweet sense of beauty, and to double the courage of virtue. So do not, as you will not, let the imps from all the fens of weariness and apathy have a minute too much. To die of feeding the fires of others were sweet, since it were not death but multiplication. And yet I hold to a more orthodox immortality too.

This morning in happiest time I have a letter from George Ripley, who tells me you have written him, and that you say pretty confidently you will come next summer. Io paean! He tells me also that Alexander Everett (brother of Edward) has sent you the friendly notice that has just appeared in the North American Review, with a letter.* All which I hope you have received. I am delighted, for this man represents a clique to which I am a stranger, and which I supposed might not love you. It must be you shall succeed when Saul prophesies. Indeed, I have heard that you may hear the Sartor preached from some of our best pulpits and lecture-rooms. Don't think I speak of myself, for I cherish carefully a salutary horror at the German style, and hold off my admiration as long as ever I can. But all my importance is quite at an end. For now that Doctors of Divinity and the solemn Review itself have broke silence to praise you, I have quite lost my plume as your harbinger.

—————- * Mr. A.H. Everett's paper on Sartor Resartus was published in the North American Review for October, 1835. —————-

I read with interest what you say of the political omens in England. I could wish our country a better comprehension of its felicity. But government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world should last his day. We have had in different parts of the country mobs and moblike legislation, and even moblike judicature, which have betrayed an almost godless state of society; so that I begin to think even here it behoves every man to quit his dependency on society as much as he can, as he would learn to go without crutches that will be soon plucked away from him, and settle with himself the principles he can stand upon, happen what may. There is reading, and public lecturing too, in this country, that I could recommend as medicine to any gentleman who finds the love of life too strong in him.

If virtue and friendship have not yet become fables, do believe we keep your face for the living type. I was very glad to hear of the brother you describe, for I have one too, and know what it is to have presence in two places. Charles Chauncy Emerson is a lawyer now settled in this town, and, as I believe, no better Lord Hamlet was ever. He is our Doctor on all questions of taste, manners, or action. And one of the pure pleasures I promise myself in the months to come is to make you two gentlemen know each other.



X. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, Mass., 8 April, 1856

My Dear Friend,—I am concerned at not hearing from you. I have written you two letters, one in October, one in November, I believe, since I had any tidings of you.* Your last letter is dated 27 June, 1835. I have counted all the chances of delay and miscarriage, and still am anxious lest you are ill, or have forgotten us. I have looked at the advertising sheet of the booksellers, but it promised nothing of the History. I thought I had made the happiest truce with sorrow in having the promise of your coming,—I was to take possession of a new kingdom of virtue and friendship. Let not the new wine mourn. Speak to me out of the wide silence. Many friends inquire of me concerning you, and you must write some word immediately on receipt of this sheet.

—————— * One in August by Mrs. Child, apparently not delivered, and one, the preceding, in October. —————-

With it goes an American reprint of the Sartor. Five hundred copies only make the edition, at one dollar a copy. About one hundred and fifty copies are subscribed for. How it will be received I know not. I am not very sanguine, for I often hear and read somewhat concerning its repulsive style. Certainly, I tell them, it is very odd. Yet I read a chapter lately with great pleasure. I send you also, with Dr. Channing's regards and good wishes, a copy of his little work, lately published, on our great local question of Slavery.

You must have written me since July. I have reckoned upon your projected visit the ensuing summer or autumn, and have conjectured the starlike influences of a new spiritual element. Especially Lectures. My own experiments for one or two winters, and the readiness with which you embrace the work, have led me to think much and to expect much from this mode of addressing men. In New England the Lyceum, as we call it, is already a great institution. Beside the more elaborate courses of lectures in the cities, every country town has its weekly evening meeting, called a Lyceum, and every professional man in the place is called upon, in the course of the winter, to entertain his fellow-citizens with a discourse on whatever topic. The topics are miscellaneous as heart can wish. But in Boston, Lowell, Salem, courses are given by individuals. I see not why this is not the most flexible of all organs of opinion, from its popularity and from its newness permitting you to say what you think, without any shackles of prescription. The pulpit in our age certainly gives forth an obstructed and uncertain sound, and the faith of those in it, if men of genius, may differ so much from that of those under it, as to embarrass the conscience of the speaker, because so much is attributed to him from the fact of standing there. In the Lyceum nothing is presupposed. The orator is only responsible for what his lips articulate. Then what scope it allows! You may handle every member and relation of humanity. What could Homer, Socrates, or St. Paul say that cannot be said here? The audience is of all classes, and its character will be determined always by the name of the lecturer. Why may you not give the reins to your wit, your pathos, your philosophy, and become that good despot which the virtuous orator is?

Another thing. I am persuaded that, if a man speak well, he shall find this a well-rewarded work in New England. I have written this year ten lectures; I had written as many last year. And for reading both these and those at places whither I was invited, I have received this last winter about three hundred and fifty dollars. Had I, in lieu of receiving a lecturer's fee, myself advertised that I would deliver these in certain places, these receipts would have been greatly increased. I insert all this because my prayers for you in this country are quite of a commercial spirit. If you lose no dollar by us, I shall joyfully trust your genius and virtue for your satisfaction on all other points.

I cannot remember that there are any other mouthpieces that are specially vital at this time except Criticism and Parliamentary Debate. I think this of ours would possess in the hands of a great genius great advantages over both. But what avail any commendations of the form, until I know that the man is alive and well? If you love them that love you, write me straightway of your welfare. My wife desires to add to mine her friendliest greetings to Mrs. Carlyle and to yourself.

Yours affectionately, R. Waldo Emerson

I ought to say that Le-Baron Russell, a worthy young man who studies Engineering, did cause the republication of Teufelsdrockh.* I trust you shall yet see a better American review of it than the North American.

—————— * This first edition of Sartor as an independent volume was published by James Munroe and Company, Boston. Emerson, at Mr. (now Dr.) Russell's request, wrote a Preface for the book. He told Dr. Russell that his brother Charles was not pleased with the Preface, thinking it "too commonplace, too much like all prefaces." —————-



XI. Carlyle to Emerson

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London 29 April, 1836

My Dear Emerson,—Barnard is returning across the water, and must not go back without a flying salutation for you. These many weeks I have had your letter by me; these many weeks I have felt always that it deserved and demanded a grateful answer; and, alas! also that I could give it none. It is impossible for you to figure what mood I am in. One sole thought, That Book! that weary Book! occupies me continually: wreck and confusion of all kinds go tumbling and falling around me, within me; but to wreck and growth, to confusion and order, to the world at large, I turn a deaf ear; and have life only for this one thing,—which also in general I feel to be one of the pitifulest that ever man went about possessed with. Have compassion for me! It is really very miserable: but it will end. Some months more, and it is ended; and I am done with French Revolution, and with Revolution and Revolt in general; and look once more with free eyes over this Earth, where are other things than mean internecine work of that kind: things fitter for me, under the bright Sun, on this green Mother's-bosom (though the Devil does dwell in it)! For the present, really, it is like a Nessus' shirt, burning you into madness, this wretched Enterprise; nay, it is also like a kind of Panoply, rendering you invulnerable, insensible, to all other mischiefs.

I got the fatal First Volume finished (in the miserablest way, after great efforts) in October last; my head was all in a whirl; I fled to Scotland and my Mother for a month of rest. Rest is nowhere for the Son of Adam: all looked so "spectral" to me in my old-familiar Birthland; Hades itself could not have seemed stranger; Annandale also was part of the kingdom of TIME. Since November I have worked again as I could; a second volume got wrapped up and sealed out of my sight within the last three days. There is but a Third now: one pull more, and then! It seems to me, I will fly into some obscurest cranny of the world, and lie silent there for a twelvemonth. The mind is weary, the body is very sick; a little black speck dances to and fro in the left eye (part of the retina protesting against the liver, and striking work): I cannot help it; it must flutter and dance there, like a signal of distress, unanswered till I be done. My familiar friends tell me farther that the Book is all wrong, style cramp, &c., &c.: my friends, I answer, you are very right; but this also, Heaven be my witness, I cannot help.—In such sort do I live here; all this I had to write you, if I wrote at all.

For the rest I cannot say that this huge blind monster of a City is without some sort of charm for me. It leaves one alone, to go his own road unmolested. Deep in your soul you take up your protest against it, defy it, and even despise it; but need not divide yourself from it for that. Worthy individuals are glad to hear your thought, if it have any sincerity; they do not exasperate themselves or you about it; they have not even time for such a thing. Nay, in stupidity itself on a scale of this magnitude, there is an impressiveness, almost a sublimity; one thinks how, in the words of Schiller, "the very Gods fight against it in vain"; how it lies on its unfathomable foundations there, inert yet peptic; nay, eupeptic; and is a Fact in the world, let theory object as it will. Brown-stout, in quantities that would float a seventy-four, goes down the throats of men; and the roaring flood of life pours on;—over which Philosophy and Theory are but a poor shriek of remonstrance, which oftenest were wiser, perhaps, to hold its peace. I grow daily to honor Facts more and more, and Theory less and less. A Fact, it seems to me, is a great thing: a Sentence printed if not by God, then at least by the Devil;—neither Jeremy Bentham nor Lytton Bulwer had a hand in that.

There are two or three of the best souls here I have known for long: I feel less alone with them; and yet one is alone,—a stranger and a pilgrim. These friends expect mainly that the Church of England is not dead but asleep; that the leather coaches, with their gilt panels, can be peopled again with a living Aristocracy, instead of the simulacra of such. I must altogether hold my peace to this, as I do to much. Coleridge is the Father of all these. Ay de mi!

But to look across the "divine salt-sea." A letter reached me, some two months ago, from Mobile, Alabama; the writer, a kind friend of mine, signs himself James Freeman Clarke.* I have mislaid, not lost his Letter; and do not at present know his permanent address (for he seemed to be only on a visit at Mobile); but you, doubtless, do know it. Will you therefore take or even find an opportunity to tell this good Friend that it is not the wreckage of the Liverpool ship he wrote by, nor insensibility on my part, that prevents his hearing direct from me; that I see him, and love him in this Letter; and hope we shall meet one day under the Sun, shall live under it, at any rate, with many a kind thought towards one another.

————— * Now the Rev. Dr. Clarke, of Boston. —————

The North American Review you spoke of never came (I mean that copy of it with the Note in it); but another copy became rather public here, to the amusement of some. I read the article myself: surely this Reviewer, who does not want in [sense]* otherwise, is an original: either a thrice-plied quiz (Sartor's "Editor" a twice-plied one); or else opening on you a grandeur of still Dulness, rarely to be met with on earth.

——————- * The words supplied here were lost under the seal of the letter. ——————-

My friend! I must end here. Forgive me till I get done with this Book. Can you have the generosity to write, without an answer? Well, if you cannot, I will answer. Do not forget me. My love and my Wife's to your good Lady, to your Brother, and all friends. Tell me what you do; what your world does. As for my world, take this (which I rendered from the German Voss, a tough old-Teutonic fellow) for the best I can say of it:—

"As journeys this Earth, her eye on a Sun, through the heavenly spaces, And, radiant in azure, or Sunless, swallowed in tempests, Falters not, alters not; journeying equal, sunlit or stormgirt So thou, Son of Earth, who hast Force, Goal, and Time, go still onwards."

Adieu, my dear friend! Believe me ever Yours, Thomas Carlyle



XII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, Massachusetts, 17 September, 1836

My Dear Friend,—I hope you do not measure my love by the tardiness of my messages. I have few pleasures like that of receiving your kind and eloquent letters. I should be most impatient of the long interval between one and another, but that they savor always of Eternity, and promise me a friendship and friendly inspiration not reckoned or ended by days or years. Your last letter, dated in April, found me a mourner, as did your first. I have lost out of this world my brother Charles,* of whom I have spoken to you,—the friend and companion of many years, the inmate of my house, a man of a beautiful genius, born to speak well, and whose conversation for these last years has treated every grave question of humanity, and has been my daily bread. I have put so much dependence on his gifts that we made but one man together; for I needed never to do what he could do by noble nature much better than I. He was to have been married in this month, and at the time of his sickness and sudden death I was adding apartments to my house for his permanent accommodation. I wish that you could have known him. At twenty-seven years the best life is only preparation. He built his foundation so large that it needed the full age of man to make evident the plan and proportions of his character. He postponed always a particular to a final and absolute success, so that his life was a silent appeal to the great and generous. But some time I shall see you and speak of him.

————- * Charles Chauncy Emerson,—died May 9, 1836,—whose memory still survives fresh and beautiful in the hearts of the few who remain who knew him in life. A few papers of his published in the Dial show to others what he was and what he might have become. —————-

We want but two or three friends, but these we cannot do without, and they serve us in every thought we think. I find now I must hold faster the remaining jewels of my social belt. And of you I think much and anxiously since Mrs. Channing, amidst her delight at what she calls the happiest hour of her absence, in her acquaintance with you and your family, expresses much uneasiness respecting your untempered devotion to study. I am the more disturbed by her fears, because your letters avow a self-devotion to your work, and I know there is no gentle dulness in your temperament to counteract the mischief. I fear Nature has not inlaid fat earth enough into your texture to keep the ethereal blade from whetting it through. I write to implore you to be careful of your health. You are the property of all whom you rejoice in art and soul, and you must not deal with your body as your own. O my friend, if you would come here and let me nurse you and pasture you in my nook of this long continent, I will thank God and you therefor morning and evening, and doubt not to give you, in a quarter of a year, sound eyes, round cheeks, and joyful spirits. My wife has been lately an invalid, but she loves you thoroughly, and hardly stores a barrel of flour or lays her new carpet without some hopeful reference to Mrs. Carlyle. And in good earnest, why cannot you come here forthwith, and deliver in lectures to the solid men of Boston the History of the French Revolution before it is published,—or at least whilst it is publishing in England, and before it is published here. There is no doubt of the perfect success of such a course now that the five hundred copies of the Sartor are all sold, and read with great delight by many persons.

This I suggest if you too must feel the vulgar necessity of doing; but if you will be governed by your friend, you shall come into the meadows, and rest and talk with your friend in my country pasture. If you will come here like a noble brother, you shall have your solid day undisturbed, except at the hours of eating and walking; and as I will abstain from you myself, so I will defend you from others. I entreat Mrs. Carlyle, with my affectionate remembrances, to second me in this proposition, and not suffer the wayward man to think that in these space-destroying days a prayer from Boston, Massachusetts, is any less worthy of serious and prompt granting than one from Edinburgh or Oxford.

I send you a little book I have just now published, as an entering wedge, I hope, for something more worthy and significant.* This is only a naming of topics on which I would gladly speak and gladlier hear. I am mortified to learn the ill fate of my former packet containing the Sartor and Dr. Channing's work. My mercantile friend is vexed, for he says accurate orders were given to send it as a packet, not as a letter. I shall endeavor before despatching this sheet to obtain another copy of our American edition.

—————- * This was Nature, the first clear manifesto of Emerson's genius. —————-

I wish I could come to you instead of sending this sheet of paper. I think I should persuade you to get into a ship this Autumn, quit all study for a time, and follow the setting sun. I have many, many things to learn of you. How melancholy to think how much we need confession!...* Yet the great truths are always at hand, and all the tragedy of individual life is separated how thinly from that universal nature which obliterates all ranks, all evils, all individualities. How little of you is in your will! Above your will how intimately are you related to all of us! In God we meet. Therein we are, thence we descend upon Time and these infinitesimal facts of Christendom, and Trade, and England Old and New. Wake the soul now drunk with a sleep, and we overleap at a bound the obstructions, the griefs, the mistakes, of years, and the air we breathe is so vital that the Past serves to contribute nothing to the result.

—————- ** Some words appear to be lost here. —————-

I read Goethe, and now lately the posthumous volumes, with a great interest. A friend of mine who studies his life with care would gladly know what records there are of his first ten years after his settlement at Weimar, and what Books there are in Germany about him beside what Mrs. Austin has collected and Heine. Can you tell me?

Write me of your health, or else come.

Yours ever, R.W. Emerson.

P.S.—I learn that an acquaintance is going to England, so send the packet by him.



XIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 5 November, 1836

My Dear Friend,—You are very good to write to me in my silence, in the mood you must be in. My silence you may well judge is not forgetfulness; it is a forced silence; which this kind Letter enforces into words. I write the day after your letter comes, lest the morrow bring forth something new to hinder me.

What a bereavement, my Friend, is this that has overtaken you! Such a Brother, with such a Life opening around him, like a blooming garden where he was to labor and gather, all vanished suddenly like frostwork, and hidden from your eye! It is a loss, a sore loss; which God had appointed you. I do not tell you not to mourn: I mourn with you, and could wish all mourners the spirit you have in this sorrow. Oh, I know it well! Often enough in this noisy Inanity of a vision where we still linger, I say to myself, Perhaps thy Buried Ones are not far from thee, are with thee; they are in Eternity, which is a Now and HERE! And yet Nature will have her right; Memory would feel desecrated if she could forget. Many times in the crowded din of the Living, some sight, some feature of a face, will recall to you the Loved Face; and in these turmoiling streets you see the little silent Churchyard, the green grave that lies there so silent, inexpressibly wae. O, perhaps we shall all meet YONDER, and the tears be wiped from all eyes! One thing is no Perhaps: surely we shall all meet, if it be the will of the Maker of us. If it be not His will,—then is it not better so? Silence,—since in these days we have no speech! Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, in any day.

You inquire so earnestly about my welfare; hold open still the hospitable door for me. Truly Concord, which I have sought out on the Map, seems worthy of its name: no dissonance comes to me from that side; but grief itself has acquired a harmony: in joy or grief a voice says to me, Behold there is one that loves thee; in thy loneliness, in thy darkness, see how a hospitable candle shines from far over seas, how a friendly heart watches! It is very good, and precious for me.

As for my health, be under no apprehension. I am always sick; I am sicker and worse in body and mind, a little, for the present; but it has no deep significance: it is weariness merely; and now, by the bounty of Heaven, I am as it were within sight of land. In two months more, this unblessed Book will be finished; at Newyearday we begin printing: before the end of March, the thing is out; and I am a free man! Few happinesses I have ever known will equal that, as it seems to me. And yet I ought not to call the poor Book unblessed: no, it has girdled me round like a panoply these two years; kept me invulnerable, indifferent, to innumerable things. The poorest man in London has perhaps been one of the freest: the roaring press of gigs and gigmen, with their gold blazonry and fierce gig-wheels, have little incommoded him; they going their way, he going his.—As for the results of the Book, I can rationally promise myself, on the economical, pecuniary, or otherwise worldly side, simply zero. It is a Book contradicting all rules of Formalism, that have not a Reality within them, which so few have;—testifying, the more quietly the worse, internecine war with Quacks high and low. My good Brother, who was with me out of Italy in summer, declared himself shocked, and almost terror-struck: "Jack," I answered, "innumerable men give their lives cheerfully to defend Falsehoods and Half-Falsehoods; why should not one writer give his life cheerfully to say, in plain Scotch-English, in the hearing of God and man, To me they seem false and half-false? At all events, thou seest, I cannot help it. It is the nature of the beast." So that, on the whole, I suppose there is no more unpromotable, unappointable man now living in England than I. Literature also, the miscellaneous place of refuge, seems done here, unless you will take the Devil's wages for it; which one does not incline to do. A disjectum membrum; cut off from relations with men? Verily so; and now forty years of age; and extremely dyspeptical: a hopeless-looking man. Yet full of what I call desperate-hope! One does verily stand on the Earth, a Star-dome encompassing one; seemingly accoutred and enlisted and sent to battle, with rations good, indifferent, or bad,—what can one do but in the name of Odin, Tuisco, Hertha, Horsa, and all Saxon and Hebrew Gods, fight it out?—This surely is very idle talk.

As to the Book, I do say seriously that it is a wild, savage, ruleless, very bad Book; which even you will not be able to like; much less any other man. Yet it contains strange things; sincerities drawn out of the heart of a man very strangely situated; reverent of nothing but what is reverable in all ages and places: so we will print it, and be done with it;—and try a new turn next time. What I am to do, were the thing done, you see therefore, is most uncertain. How gladly would I run to Concord! And if I were there, be sure the do-nothing arrangement is the only conceivable one for me. That my sick existence subside again, this is the first condition; that quiet vision be restored me. It is frightful what an impatience I have got for many kinds of fellow-creatures. Their jargon really hurts me like the shrieking of inarticulate creatures that ought to articulate. There is no resource but to say: Brother, thou surely art not hateful; thou art lovable, at lowest pitiable;— alas! in my case, thou art dreadfully wearisome, unedifying: go thy ways, with my blessing. There are hardly three people among these two millions, whom I care much to exchange words with, in the humor I have. Nevertheless, at bottom, it is not my purpose to quit London finally till I have as it were seen it out. In the very hugeness of the monstrous City, contradiction cancelling contradiction, one finds a sort of composure for one's self that is not to be met with elsewhere perhaps in the world: people tolerate you, were it only that they have not time to trouble themselves with you. Some individuals even love me here; there are one or two whom I have even learned to love,—though, for the present, cross circumstances have snatched them out of my orbit again mostly. Wherefore, if you ask me, What I am to do?—the answer is clear so far, "Rest myself awhile"; and all farther is as dark as Chaos. Now for resting, taking that by itself, my Brother, who has gone back to Rome with some thoughts of settling as a Physician there, presses me to come thither, and rest in Rome. On the other hand, a certain John Sterling (the best man I have found in these regions) has been driven to Bordeaux lately for his health; he will have it that I must come to him, and walk through the South of France to Dauphine, Avignon, and over the Alps next spring!* Thirdly, my Mother will have me return to Annandale, and lie quiet in her little habitation;—which I incline to think were the wisest course of all. And lastly from over the Atlantic comes my good Emerson's voice. We will settle nothing, except that all shall remain unsettled. Die Zukunft decket Schmerzen and Glucke.

—————— * In his Life of Sterling, Carlyle prints a letter from Sterling to himself, dated Bordeaux, October 26, 1836, in which Sterling urges him to come "in the first fine days of spring." It must have reached him a few days before he wrote this letter to Emerson. ————-

I ought to say, however, that about New-year's-day I will send you an Article on Mirabeau, which they have printed here (for a thing called the London Review), and some kind of Note to escort it. I think Pamphlets travel as Letters in New England, provided you leave the ends of them open: if I be mistaken, pray instruct Messrs. Barnard to refuse the thing, for it has small value. The Diamond Necklace is to be printed also, in Fraser; inconceivable hawking that poor Paper has had; till now Fraser takes it—for L50: not being able to get it for nothing. The Mirabeau was written at the passionate request of John Mill; and likewise for needful lucre. I think it is the first shilling of money I have earned by my craft these four years: where the money I have lived on has come from while I sat here scribbling gratis, amazes me to think; yet surely it has come (for I am still here), and Heaven only to thank for it, which is a great fact. As for Mill's London Review (for he is quasi-editor), I do not recommend it to you. Hide-bound Radicalism; a to me well-nigh insupportable thing! Open it not: a breath as of Sahara and the Infinite Sterile comes from every page of it. A young Radical Baronet* has laid out L3,000 on getting the world instructed in that manner: it is very curious to see.—Alas! the bottom of the sheet! Take my hurried but kindest thanks for the prospect of your second Teufelsdrockh: the first too is now in my possession; Brother John went to the Post-Office, and worked it out for a ten shillings. It is a beautiful little Book; and a Preface to it such as no kindest friend could have improved. Thank my kind Editor** very heartily from me.

————- * Sir William Molesworth. In his Autobiography Mill gives an interesting account of the founding of this Review, and his quasi-editorial relations to it. "In the beginning," he says, "it did not, as a whole, by any means represent my opinion."

** Dr. Le-Baron Russell ————-

My wife was in Scotland in summer, driven thither by ill health; she is stronger since her return, though not yet strong; she sends over to Concord her kindest wishes. If I fly to the Alps or the Ocean, her Mother and she must keep one another company, we think, till there be better news of me. You are to thank Dr. Channing also for his valued gift. I read the Discourse, and other friends of his read it, with great estimation; but the end of that black question lies beyond my ken. I suppose, as usual, Might and Right will have to make themselves synonymous in some way. CANST and SHALT, if they are very well understood, mean the same thing under this Sun of ours. Adieu, my dear Emerson. Gehab' Dich wohl! Many affectionate regards to the Lady Wife: it is far within the verge of Probabilities that I shall see her face, and eat of her bread, one day. But she must not get sick! It is a dreadful thing, sickness; really a thing which I begin frequently to think criminal—at least in myself. Nay, in myself it really is criminal; wherefore I determine to be well one day.

Good be with you and Yours. T. Carlyle

As to Goethe and your Friend: I know not anything out of Goethe's own works (which have many notices in them) that treats specially of those ten years. Doubtless your Friend knows Jordens's Lexicon (which dates all the writings, for one thing), the Conversations-Lexicon Supplement, and such like. There is an essay by one Schubarth which has reputation; but it is critical and ethical mainly. The Letters to Zelter, and the Letters to Schiller, will do nothing for those years, but are essential to see. Perhaps in some late number of the Zeitgenossen there may be something? Blackguard Heine is worth very little; Mentzel is duller, decenter, not much wiser. A very curious Book is Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe, just published. No room more!*

—————- * Concerning this letter Emerson wrote in his Diary: "January 7, 1837. Received day before yesterday a letter from Thomas Carlyle, dated 5 November;—as ever, a cordial influence. Strong he is, upright, noble, and sweet, and makes good how much of our human nature. Quite in consonance with my delight in his eloquent letters I read in Bacon this afternoon this sentence (of Letters): 'And such as are written from wise men are of all the words of men, in my judgment, the best; for they are more natural than orations, public speeches, and more advised than conferences or present speeches.'" ——————-



XIV. Carlyle to Emerson

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London, 13 February, 1837

My Dear Emerson,—You had promise of a letter to be despatched you about New-year's-day; which promise I was myself in a condition to fulfil at the time set, but delayed it, owing to delays of printers and certain "Articles" that were to go with it. Six weeks have not yet entirely brought up these laggard animals: however, I will delay no longer for them. Nay, it seems the Articles, were they never so ready, cannot go with the Letter; but must fare round by Liverpool or Portsmouth, in a separate conveyance. We will leave them to the bounty of Time.

Your little Book and the Copy of Teufelsdrockh came safely; soon after I had written. The Teufelsdrockh I instantaneously despatched to Hamburg, to a Scottish merchant there, to whom there is an allusion in the Book; who used to be my Speditor (one of the politest extant though totally a stranger) in my missions and packages to and from Weimar.* The other, former Copy, more specially yours, had already been, as I think I told you, delivered out of durance; and got itself placed in the bookshelf, as the Teufelsdrockh. George Ripley tells me you are printing another edition; much good may it do you! There is now also a kind of whisper and whimper rising here about printing one. I said to myself once, when Bookseller Fraser shrieked so loud at a certain message you sent him: "Perhaps after all they will print this poor rag of a thing into a Book, after I am dead it may be,—if so seem good to them. Either way!" As it is, we leave the poor orphan to its destiny, all the more cheerfully. Ripley says farther he has sent me a critique of it by a better hand than the North American: I expect it, but have not got it Yet.** The North American seems to say that he too sent me one. It never came to hand, nor any hint of it,—except I think once before through you. It was not at all an unfriendly review; but had an opacity, of matter-of-fact in it that filled one with amazement. Since the Irish Bishop who said there were some things in Gulliver on which he for one would keep his belief suspended, nothing equal to it, on that side, has come athwart me. However, he has made out that Teufelsdrockh is, in all human probability, a fictitious character; which is always something, for an Inquirer into Truth.—Will you, finally, thank Friend Ripley in my name, till I have time to write to him and thank him.

—————- * The allusion referred to is the following: "By the kindness of a Scottish Hamburg merchant, whose name, known to the whole mercantile world, he must not mention; but whose honorable courtesy, now and before spontaneously manifested to him, a mere literary stranger, he cannot soon forget,—the bulky Weissnichtwo packet, with all its Custom-house seals, foreign hieroglyphs, and miscellaneous tokens of travel, arrived here in perfect safety, and free of cost."—Sartor Resartus, Book I. ch. xi.

** An article by the Rev. N.L. Frothingham in the Christian Examiner. —————

Your little azure-colored Nature gave me true satisfaction. I read it, and then lent it about to all my acquaintance that had a sense for such things; from whom a similar verdict always came back. You say it is the first chapter of something greater. I call it rather the Foundation and Ground-plan on which you may build whatsoever of great and true has been given you to build. It is the true Apocalypse, this when the "Open Secret" becomes revealed to a man. I rejoice much in the glad serenity of soul with which you look out on this wondrous Dwelling-place of yours and mine—with an ear for the Ewigen Melodien, which pipe in the winds round us, and utter themselves forth in all sounds and sights and things: not to be written down by gamut-machinery; but which all right writing is a kind of attempt to write down. You will see what the years will bring you. It is not one of your smallest qualities in my mind, that you can wait so quietly and let the years do their best. He that cannot keep himself quiet is of a morbid nature; and the thing he yields us will be like him in that, whatever else it be.

Miss Martineau (for I have seen her since I wrote) tells me you "are the only man in America" who has quietly set himself down on a competency to follow his own path, and do the work his own will prescribes for him. Pity that you were the only one! But be one, nevertheless; be the first, and there will come a second and a third. It is a poor country where all men are sold to Mammon, and can make nothing but Railways and Bursts of Parliamentary Eloquence! And yet your New England here too has the upper hand of our Old England, of our Old Europe: we too are sold to Mammon, soul, body, and spirit; but (mark that, I pray you, with double pity) Mammon will not pay us,—we, are "Two Million three hundred thousand in Ireland that have not potatoes enough"! I declare, in History I find nothing more tragical. I find also that it will alter; that for me as one it has altered. Me Mammon will pay or not as he finds convenient; buy me he will not.—In fine, I say, sit still at Concord, with such spirit as you are of; under the blessed skyey influences, with an open sense, with the great Book of Existence open round you: we shall see whether you too get not something blessed to read us from it.

The Paper is declining fast, and all is yet speculation. Along with these two "Articles" (to be sent by Liverpool; there are two of them, Diamond Necklace and Mirabeau), you will very probably get some stray Proofsheet—of the unutterable French Revolution! It is actually at Press; two Printers working at separate Volumes of it,—though still too slow. In not many weeks, my hands will be washed of it! You, I hope, can have little conception of the feeling with which I wrote the last word of it, one night in early January, when the clock was striking ten, and our frugal Scotch supper coming in! I did not cry; nor I did not pray but could have done both. No such spell shall get itself fixed on me for some while to come! A beggarly Distortion; that will please no mortal, not even myself; of which I know not whether the fire were not after all the due place! And yet I ought not to say so: there is a great blessing in a man's doing what he utterly can, in the case he is in. Perhaps great quantities of dross are burnt out of me by this calcination I have had; perhaps I shall be far quieter and healthier of mind and body than I have ever been since boyhood. The world, though no man had ever less empire in it, seems to me a thing lying under my feet; a mean imbroglio, which I never more shall fear, or court, or disturb myself with: welcome and welcome to go wholly its own way; I wholly clear for going mine. Through the summer months I am, somewhere or other, to rest myself, in the deepest possible sleep. The residue is vague as the wind,—unheeded as the wind. Some way it will turn out that a poor, well-meaning Son of Adam has bread growing for him too, better or worse: any way,—or even no way, if that be it,—I shall be content. There is a scheme here among Friends for my Lecturing in a thing they call Royal Institution; but it will not do there, I think. The instant two or three are gathered together under any terms, who want to learn something I can teach them,—then we will, most readily, as Burns says, "loose our tinkler jaw"; but not I think till then; were the Institution even Imperial.

America has faded considerably into the background of late: indeed, to say truth, whenever I think of myself in America, it is as in the Backwoods, with a rifle in my hand, God's sky over my head, and this accursed Lazar-house of quacks and blockheads, 'and sin and misery (now near a head) lying all behind me forevermore. A thing, you see, which is and can be at bottom but a daydream! To rest through the summer: that is my only fixed wisdom; a resolution taken; only the place where uncertain.— What a pity this poor sheet is done! I had innumerable things to tell you about people whom I have seen, about books,—Miss Harriet Martineau, Mrs. Butler, Southey, Influenza, Parliament, Literature and the Life of Man,—the whole of which must lie over till next time. Write to me; do not forget me. My Wife, who is sitting by me, in very poor health (this long while), sends "kindest remembrances," "compliments" she expressly does not send. Good be with you always, my dear Friend!

—T. Carlyle

We send our felicitation to the Mother and little Boy; which latter you had better tell us the name of.



XV. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, Mass., 31 March, 1837

My Dear Friend,—Last night, I said I would write to you forthwith. This morning I received your letter of February 13th, and with it the Diamond Necklace, the Mirabeau, and the olive leaf of a proof-sheet. I write out the sum of my debt as the best acknowledgment I can make. I had already received, about New-Year's-Day, the preceding letter. It came in the midst of my washbowl-storm of a course of Lectures on the Philosophy of History. For all these gifts and pledges,—thanks. Over the finished History, joy and evergreen laurels. I embrace you with all my heart. I solace myself with the noble nature God has given you, and in you to me, and to all. I had read the Diamond Necklace three weeks ago at the Boston Athenaeum, and the Mirabeau I had just read when my copy came. But the proof-sheet was virgin gold. The Mirabeau I forebode is to establish your kingdom in England. That is genuine thunder, which nobody that wears ears can affect to mistake for the rumbling of cart-wheels. I please myself with thinking that my Angelo has blocked a Colossus which may stand in the public square to defy all competitors. To be sure, that is its least merit,—that nobody can do the like,—yet is it a gag to Cerberus. Its better merit is that it inspires self-trust, by teaching the immense resources that are in human nature; so I sent it to be read by a brave man who is poor and decried. The doctrine is indeed true and grand which you preach as by cannonade, that God made a man, and it were as well to stand by and see what is in him, and, if he act ever from his impulses, believe that he has his own checks, and, however extravagant, will keep his orbit, and return from far; a faith that draws confirmation from the sempiternal ignorance and stationariness of society, and the sempiternal growth of all the individuals.

The Diamond Necklace I read with joy, whilst I read with my own eyes. When I read with English or New-English eyes, my joy is marred by the roaring of the opposition. I doubt not the exact story is there told as it fell out, and told for the first time; but the eye of your readers, as you will easily guess, will be bewildered by the multitude of brilliant-colored hieroglyphics whereby the meaning is conveyed. And for the Gig,—the Gig,—it is fairly worn out, and such a cloud-compeller must mock that particular symbol no more.

I thought as I read this piece that your strange genius was the instant fruit of your London. It is the aroma of Babylon. Such as the great metropolis, such is this style: so vast, enormous, related to all the world, and so endless in details. I think you see as pictures every street, church, parliament-house, barrack, baker's shop, mutton-stall, forge, wharf, and ship, and whatever stands, creeps, rolls, or swims thereabouts, and make all your own. Hence your encyclopediacal allusion to all knowables, and the virtues and vices of your panoramic pages. Well, it is your own; and it is English; and every word stands for somewhat; and it cheers and fortifies me. And what more can a man ask of his writing fellow-man? Why, all things; inasmuch as a good mind creates wants at every stroke.

The proof-sheet rhymes well with Mirabeau, and has abated my fears from your own and your brother's account of the new book. I greet it well. Auspicious Babe, be born! The first good of the book is that it makes you free, and as I anxiously hope makes your body sound. A possible good is that it will cause me to see your face. But I seemed to read in Mirabeau what you intimate in your letter, that you will not come westward. Old England is to find you out, and then the New will have no charm. For me it will be the worst; for you, not. A man, a few men, cannot be to you (with your ministering eyes) that which you should travel far to find. Moreover, I observe that America looks, to those who come hither, as unromantic and unexciting as the Dutch canals. I see plainly that our Society, for the most part, is as bigoted to the respectabilities of religion and education as yours; that there is no more appetite for a revelation here than elsewhere; and the educated class are, of course, less fair-minded than others. Yet, in the moments when my eyes are open, I see that here are rich materials for the philosopher and poet, and, what is more to your purpose as an artist, that we have had in these parts no one philosopher or poet to put a sickle to the prairie wheat. I have really never believed that you would do us that crowning grace of coming hither, yet if God should be kinder to us than our belief, I meant and mean to hold you fast in my little meadows on the Musketaquid (now Concord) River, and show you (as in this country we can anywhere) an America in miniature in the April or November town meeting. Therein should you conveniently study and master the whole of our hemispherical politics reduced to a nutshell, and have a new version of Oxenstiern's little wit; and yet be consoled by seeing that here the farmers patient as their bulls of head-boards—provided for them in relation to distant national objects, by kind editors of newspapers—do yet their will, and a good will, in their own parish. If a wise man would pass by New York, and be content to sit still in this village a few months, he should get a thorough native knowledge which no foreigner has yet acquired. So I leave you with God, and if any oracle in the great Delphos should say "Go," why fly to us instantly. Come and spend a year with me, and see if I cannot respect your retirements.

I must love you for your interest in me and my way of life, and the more that we only look for good-nature in the creative class. They pay the tag of grandeur, and, attracted irresistibly to make, their living is usually weak and hapless. But you are so companionable—God has made you Man as well as Poet—that I lament the three thousand miles of mountainous water. Burns might have added a better verse to his poem, importing that one might write Iliads or Hamlets, and yet come short of Truth by infinity, as every written word must; but "the man's the gowd for a' that." And I heartily thank the Lady for her good-will. Please God she may be already well. We all grieve to know of her ill health. People who have seen her never stop with Mr. Carlyle, but count him thrice blest in her. My wife believes in nothing for her but the American voyage. I shall never cease to expect you both until you come.

My boy is five months old, he is called Waldo,—a lovely wonder that made the Universe look friendlier to me.

My Wife, one of your best lovers, sends her affectionate regards to Mrs. Carlyle, and says that she takes exception in your letters only to that sentence that she would go to Scotland if you came here. My Wife beseeches her to come and possess her new-dressed chamber. Do not cease to write whenever you can spare me an hour. A man named Bronson Alcott is great, and one of the jewels we have to show you. Good bye.

—R.W. Emerson

The second edition of Sartor is out and sells well. I learned the other day that twenty-five copies of it were ordered for England. It was very amiable of you, that word about it in Mirabeau.*

————— * This refers to Carlyle's introducing, in his paper on Mirabeau, a citation from Sartor, with the words, "We quote from a New England Book." —————



XVI. Carlyle to Emerson

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London, 1 June, 1857

My Dear Friend,—A word must go to Concord in answer to your last kind word. It reached me, that word of yours, on the morning of a most unspeakable day; the day when I, half dead with fret, agitation, and exasperation, was to address extempore an audience of London quality people on the subject of German Literature! The heart's wish of me was that I might be left in deepest oblivion, wrapped in blankets and silence, not speaking, not spoken to, for a twelvemonth to come. My Printers had only let me go, out of their Treadmill, the day before. However, all that is over now; and I am still here alive to write to you, and hope for better days.

Almost a month ago there went a copy of a Book called French Revolution, with your address on it, over to Red-Lion Square, and thence, as old Rich declared, himself now emeritus, back to one Kennet (I think) near Covent Garden; who professes to correspond with Hilliard and Company, Boston, and undertook the service. The Book is not gone yet, I understand; but Kennet engages that it shall leave Liverpool infallibly on the 5th of June. I wish you a happy reading of it, therefore: it is the only copy of my sending that has crossed the water. Ill printed (there are many errors, one or two gross ones), ill written, ill thought! But in fine it is off my hands: that is a fact worth all others. As to its reception here or elsewhere, I anticipate nothing or little. Gabble, gabble, the astonishment of the dull public brain is likely to be considerable, and its ejaculations unedifying. We will let it go its way. Beat this thing, I say always, under thy dull hoofs, O dull Public! trample it and tumble it into all sinks and kennels; if thou canst kill it, kill it in God's name: if thou canst not kill it, why then thou wilt not.

By the by, speaking of dull Publics, I ought to say that I have seen a review of myself in the Christian Examiner (I think that is it) of Boston; the author of which, if you know him, I desire you to thank on my part. For if a dull million is good, then withal a seeing unit or two is also good. This man images back a beautiful idealized Clothes-Philosopher, very satisfactory to look upon; in whose beatified features I did verily detect more similitude to what I myself meant to be, than in any or all the other criticisms I have yet seen written of me. That a man see himself reflected from the soul of his brother-man in this brotherly improved way: there surely is one of the most legitimate joys of existence. Friend Ripley took the trouble to send me this Review, in which I detected an Article of his own; there came also some Discourses of his much to be approved of; a Newspaper passage-of-fence with a Philistine of yours; and a set of Essays on Progress-of-the-species and such like by a man whom I grieved to see confusing himself with that. Progress of the species is a thing I can get no good of at all. These Books, which Miss Martineau has borrowed from me, did not arrive till three weeks ago or less. I pray you to thank Ripley for them very kindly; which at present I still have not time to do. He seems to me a good man, with good aims; with considerable natural health of mind, wherein all goodness is likely to grow better, all clearness to grow clearer. Miss Martineau laments that he does not fling himself, or not with the due impetuosity, into the Black Controversy; a thing lamentable in the extreme, when one considers what a world this is, and how perfect it would be could Mungo once get his stupid case rectified, and eat his squash as a stupid Apprentice instead of stupid Slave!

Miss Martineau's Book on America is out, here and with you. I have read it for the good Authoress's sake, whom I love much. She is one of the strangest phenomena to me. A genuine little Poetess, buckramed, swathed like a mummy into Socinian and Political-Economy formulas; and yet verily alive in the inside of that! "God has given a Prophet to every People in its own speech," say the Arabs. Even the English Unitarians were one day to have their Poet, and the best that could be said for them too was to be said. I admire this good lady's integrity, sincerity; her quick, sharp discernment to the depth it goes: her love also is great; nay, in fact it is too great: the host of illustrious obscure mortals whom she produces on you, of Preachers, Pamphleteers, Antislavers, Able Editors, and other Atlases bearing (unknown to us) the world on their shoulder, is absolutely more than enough. What they say to her Book here I do not well know. I fancy the general reception will be good, and even brilliant. I saw Mrs. Butler* last night, "in an ocean of blonde and broadcloth," one of those oceans common at present. Ach Gott! They are not of Persons, these soirdes, but of Cloth Figures.

————— * Mrs Fanny Kemble Butler. —————

I mean to retreat into Scotland very soon, to repose myself as I intended. My Wife continues here with her Mother; here at least till the weather grow too hot, or a journey to join me seem otherwise advisable for her. She is gathering strength, but continues still weak enough. I rest myself "on the sunny side of hedges" in native Annandale, one of the obscurest regions; no man shall speak to me, I will speak to no man; but have dialogues yonder with the old dumb crags, of the most unfathomable sort. Once rested, I think of returning to London for another season. Several things are beginning which I ought to see end before taking up my staff again. In this enormous Chaos the very multitude of conflicting perversions produces something more like a calm than you can elsewhere meet with. Men let you alone, which is an immense thing: they do it even because they have no time to meddle with you. London, or else the Backwoods of America, or Craigenputtock! We shall see.

I still beg the comfort of hearing from you. I am sick of soul and body, but not incurable; the loving word of a Waldo Emerson is as balm to me, medicinal now more than ever. My Wife earnestly joins me in love to the Concord Household. May a blessing be in it, on one and all! I do nowise give up the idea of sojourning there one time yet. On the contrary, it seems almost certain that I shall. Good be with you.

Yours always, T. Carlyle*

—————- * Emerson wrote in his Diary, July 27, 1837: "A letter today from Carlyle rejoiced me. Pleasant would life be with such companions. But if you cannot have them on good mutual terms you cannot have them. If not the Deity but our wilfulness hews and shapes the new relations, their sweetness escapes, as strawberries lose their flavor by cultivation." —————



XVII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 13 September, 1837

My Dear Friend,—Such a gift as the French Revolution demanded a speedier acknowledgment. But you mountaineers that can scale Andes before breakfast for an airing have no measures for the performance of lowlanders and valetudinarians. I am ashamed to think, and will not tell, what little things have kept me silent.

The French Revolution did not reach me until three weeks ago, having had at least two long pauses by the way, as I find, since landing. Between many visits received, and some literary haranguing done, I have read two volumes and half the third and I think you a very good giant; disporting yourself with an original and vast ambition of fun: pleasure and peace not being strong enough for you, you choose to suck pain also, and teach fever and famine to dance and sing. I think you have written a wonderful book, which will last a very long time. I see that you have created a history, which the world will own to be such. You have recognized the existence of other persons than officers, and of other relations than civism. You have broken away from all books, and written a mind. It is a brave experiment, and the success is great. We have men in your story and not names merely; always men, though I may doubt sometimes whether I have the historic men. We have great facts—and selected facts—truly set down. We have always the co-presence of Humanity along with the imperfect damaged individuals. The soul's right of wonder is still left to us; and we have righteous praise and doom awarded, assuredly without cant. Yes, comfort yourself on that particular, O ungodliest divine man! thou cantest never. Finally we have not—a dull word. Never was there a style so rapid as yours,—which no reader can outrun; and so it is for the most intelligent. I suppose nothing will astonish more than the audacious wit and cheerfulness which no tragedy and no magnitude of events can overpower or daunt. Henry VIII loved a Man, and I see with joy my bard always equal to the crisis he represents. And so I thank you for your labor, and feel that your contemporaries ought to say, All hail, Brother! live forever: not only in the great Soul which thou largely inhalest, but also as a named, person in this thy definite deed.

I will tell you more of the book when I have once got it at focal distance,—if that can ever be, and muster my objections when I am sure of their ground. I insist, of course, that it might be more simple, less Gothically efflorescent. You will say no rules for the illumination of windows can apply to the Aurora borealis. However, I find refreshment when every now and then a special fact slips into the narrative couched in sharp and businesslike terms. This character-drawing in the book is certainly admirable; the lines are ploughed furrows; but there was cake and ale before, though thou be virtuous. Clarendon surely drew sharp outlines for me in Falkland, Hampden, and the rest, without defiance or sky-vaulting. I wish I could talk with you face to face for one day, and know what your uttermost frankness would say concerning the book. I feel assured of its good reception in this country. I learned last Saturday that in all eleven hundred and sixty-six copies of Sartor have been sold. I have told the publisher of that book that he must not print the History until some space has been given to people to import British copies. I have ordered Hilliard, Gray, & Co. to import twenty copies as an experiment. At the present very high rate of exchange, which makes a shilling worth thirty cents, they think, with freight and duties, the book would be too costly here for sale, but we confide in a speedy fall of Exchange; then my books shall come. I am ashamed that you should educate our young men, and that we should pirate your books. One day we will have a better law, or perhaps you will make our law yours.

I had your letter long before your book. Very good work you have done in your lifetime, and very generously you adorn and cheer this pilgrimage of mine by your love. I find my highest prayer granted in calling a just and wise man my friend. Your profuse benefaction of genius in so few years makes me feel very poor and useless. I see that I must go on trust to you and to all the brave for some longer time, hoping yet to prove one day my truth and love. There are in this country so few scholars, that the services of each studious person are needed to do what he can for the circulation of thoughts, to the end of making some counterweight to the money force, and to give such food as he may to the nigh starving youth. So I religiously read lectures every winter, and at other times whenever summoned. Last year, "the Philosophy of History," twelve lectures; and now I meditate a course on what I call "Ethics." I peddle out all the wit I can gather from Time or from Nature, and am pained at heart to see how thankfully that little is received.

Write to me, good friend, tell me if you went to Scotland,—what you do, and will do,—tell me that your wife is strong and well again as when I saw her at Craigenputtock. I desire to be affectionately remembered to her. Tell me when you will come hither. I called together a little club a week ago, who spent a day with me,—counting fifteen souls,—each one of whom warmly loves you. So if the French Revolution does not convert the "dull public" of your native Nineveh, I see not but you must shake their dust from your shoes and cross the Atlantic to a New England. Yours in love and honor.

—R. Waldo Emerson

May I trouble you with a commission when you are in the City? You mention being at the shop of Rich in Red-Lion Square. Will you say to him that he sent me some books two or three years ago without any account of prices annexed? I wrote him once myself, once through S. Burdett, bookseller, and since through C.P. Curtis, Esq., who professes to be his attorney in Boston,—three times,—to ask for this account. No answer has ever come. I wish he would send me the account, that I may settle it. If he persist in his self-denying contumacy, I think you may immortalize him as a bookseller of the gods.

I shall send you an Oration presently, delivered before a literary society here, which is now being printed.* Gladly I hear of the Carlylet—so they say—in the new Westminster.

————- * This was Emerson's famous Oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837, on "The American Scholar." In his admirable essay on Thoreau,—an essay which might serve as introduction and comment to the letters of Carlyle and Emerson during these years,—Lowell speaks of the impression made by this remarkable discourse. It "was an event without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent! It was our Yankee version of a lecture by Abelard, our Harvard parallel to the last public appearances of Schelling."—My Study Windows, p. 197 ————-



XVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 2 November, 1837

My Dear Friend,—Mr. Charles Sumner, a lawyer of high standing for his age, and editor or one editor of a journal called The Jurist, and withal a lover of your writings, tells me he is going to Paris and thence to London, and sets out in a few days. I cannot, of course, resist his request for a letter to you, nor let pass the occasion of a greeting. Health, Joy, and Peace be with you! I hope you sit still yet, and do not hastily meditate new labors. Phidias need not be always tinkering. Sit still like an Egyptian. Somebody told me the other day that your friends here might have made a sum for the author by publishing Sartor themselves, instead of leaving it with a bookseller. Instantly I wondered why I had never such a thought before, and went straight to Boston, and have made a bargain with a bookseller to print the French Revolution. It is to be printed in two volumes of the size of our American Sartor, one thousand copies, the estimate making the cost of the book say (in dollars and cents) $1.18 a copy, and the price $2.50. The bookseller contracts with me to sell the book at a commission of twenty percent on that selling price, allowing me however to take at cost as many copies as I can find subscribers for. There is yet, I believe, no other copy in the country than mine: so I gave him the first volume, and the printing is begun. I shall take care that your friends here shall know my contract with the bookseller, and so shall give me their names. Then, if so good a book can have a tolerable sale, (almost contrary to the nature of a good book, I know,) I shall sustain with great glee the new relation of being your banker and attorney. They have had the wit in the London Examiner, I find, to praise at last; and I mean that our public shall have the entire benefit of that page. The Westminster they can read themselves. The printers think they can get the book out by Christmas. So it must be long before I can tell you what cheer. Meantime do you tell me, I entreat you, what speed it has had at home. The best, I hope, with the wise and good withal.

I have nothing to tell you and no thoughts. I have promised a course of Lectures for December, and am far from knowing what I am to say; but the way to make sure of fighting into the new continent is to burn your ships. The "tender ears," as George Fox said, of young men are always an effectual call to me ignorant to speak. I find myself so much more and freer on the platform of the lecture-room than in the pulpit, that I shall not much more use the last; and do now only in a little country chapel at the request of simple men to whom I sustain no other relation than that of preacher. But I preach in the Lecture-Room and then it tells, for there is no prescription. You may laugh, weep, reason, sing, sneer, or pray, according to your genius. It is the new pulpit, and very much in vogue with my northern countrymen. This winter, in Boston, we shall have more than ever: two or three every night of the week. When will you come and redeem your pledge? The day before yesterday my little boy was a year old,—no, the day before that,—and I cannot tell you what delight and what study I find in this little bud of God, which I heartily desire you also should see. Good, wise, kind friend, I shall see you one day. Let me hear, when you can write, that Mrs. Carlyle is well again.

—R. Waldo Emerson



XIX. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 8 December, 1837

My Dear Emerson,—How long it is since you last heard of me I do not very accurately know; but it is too long. A very long, ugly, inert, and unproductive chapter of my own history seems to have passed since then. Whenever I delay writing, be sure matters go not well with me; and do you in that case write to me, were it again and over again,—unweariable in pity.

I did go to Scotland, for almost three months; leaving my Wife here with her Mother. The poor Wife had fallen so weak that she gave me real terror in the spring-time, and made the Doctor look very grave indeed: she continued too weak for traveling: I was worn out as I had never in my life been. So, on the longest day of June, I got back to my Mother's cottage; threw myself down, I may say, into what we may call the "frightfulest magnetic sleep," and lay there avoiding the intercourse of men. Most wearisome had their gabble become; almost unearthly. But indeed all was unearthly in that humor. The gushing of my native brooks, the sough of the old solitary woods, the great roar of old native Solway (billowing fresh out of your Atlantic, drawn by the Moon): all this was a kind of unearthly music to me; I cannot tell you how unearthly. It did not bring me to rest; yet towards rest I do think at all events, the time had come when I behoved to quit it again. I have been here since September evidently another little "chapter" or paragraph, not altogether inert, is getting forward. But I must not speak of these things. How can I speak of them on a miserable scrap of blue paper? Looking into your kind-eyes with my eyes, I could speak: not here. Pity me, my friend, my brother; yet hope well of me: if I can (in all senses) rightly hold my peace, I think much will yet be well with me. SILENCE is the great thing I worship at present; almost the sole tenant of my Pantheon. Let a man know rightly how to hold his peace. I love to repeat to myself, "Silence is of Eternity." Ah me, I think how I could rejoice to quit these jarring discords and jargonings of Babel, and go far, far away! I do believe, if I had the smallest competence of money to get "food and warmth" with, I would shake the mud of London from my feet, and go and bury myself in some green place, and never print any syllable more. Perhaps it is better as it is.

But quitting this, we will actually speak (under favor of "Silence") one very small thing; a pleasant piece of news. There is a man here called John Sterling (Reverend John of the Church of England too), whom I love better than anybody I have met with, since a certain sky-messenger alighted to me at Craigenputtock, and vanished in the Blue again. This Sterling has written; but what is far better, he has lived, he is alive. Across several unsuitable wrappages, of Church-of-Englandism and others, my heart loves the man. He is one, and the best, of a small class extant here, who, nigh drowning in a black wreck of Infidelity (lighted up by some glare of Radicalism only, now growing dim too) and about to perish, saved themselves into a Coleridgian Shovel-hattedness, or determination to preach, to preach peace, were it only the spent echo of a peace once preached. He is still only about thirty; young; and I think will shed the shovel-hat yet perhaps. Do you ever read Blackwood? This John Sterling is the "New Contributor" whom Wilson makes such a rout about, in the November and prior month "Crystals from a Cavern," &c., which it is well worth your while to see. Well, and what then, cry you?—Why then, this John Sterling has fallen overhead in love with a certain Waldo Emerson; that is all. He saw the little Book Nature lying here; and, across a whole silva silvarum of prejudices, discerned what was in it; took it to his heart,—and indeed into his pocket; and has carried it off to Madeira with him; whither unhappily (though now with good hope and expectation) the Doctors have ordered him. This is the small piece of pleasant news, that two sky-messengers (such they were both of them to me) have met and recognized each other; and by God's blessing there shall one day be a trio of us: call you that nothing?

And so now by a direct transition I am got to the Oration. My friend! you know not what you have done for me there. It was long decades of years that I had heard nothing but the infinite jangling and jabbering, and inarticulate twittering and screeching, and my soul had sunk down sorrowful, and said there is no articulate speaking then any more, and thou art solitary among stranger-creatures? and lo, out of the West comes a clear utterance, clearly recognizable as a man's voice, and I have a kinsman and brother: God be thanked for it! I could have wept to read that speech; the clear high melody of it went tingling through my heart;—I said to my wife, "There, woman!" She read; and returned, and charges me to return for answer, "that there had been nothing met with like it since Schiller went silent." My brave Emerson! And all this has been lying silent, quite tranquil in him, these seven years, and the "vociferous platitude" dinning his ears on all sides, and he quietly answering no word; and a whole world of Thought has silently built itself in these calm depths, and, the day being come, says quite softly, as if it were a common thing, "Yes, I am here too." Miss Martineau tells me, "Some say it is inspired, some say it is mad." Exactly so; no say could be suitabler. But for you, my dear friend, I say and pray heartily: May God grant you strength; for you have a fearful work to do! Fearful I call it; and yet it is great, and the greatest. O for God's sake keep yourself still quiet! Do not hasten to write; you cannot be too slow about it. Give no ear to any man's praise or censure; know that that is not it: on the one side is as Heaven if you have strength to keep silent, and climb unseen; yet on the other side, yawning always at one's right-hand and one's left, is the frightfulest Abyss and Pandemonium! See Fenimore Cooper;—poor Cooper, he is down in it; and had a climbing faculty too. Be steady, be quiet, be in no haste; and God speed you well! My space is done.

And so adieu, for this time. You must write soon again. My copy of the Oration has never come: how is this? I could dispose of a dozen well.—They say I am to lecture again in Spring, Ay de mi! The "Book" is babbled about sufficiently in several dialects: Fraser wants to print my scattered Reviews and Articles; a pregnant sign. Teufelsdrockh to precede. The man "screamed" once at the name of it in a very musical manner. He shall not print a line; unless he give me money for it, more or less. I have had enough of printing for one while,—thrown into "magnetic sleep" by it! Farewell my brother.

—T. Carlyle

O. Rich, it seems, is in Spain. His representative assured me, some weeks since, that the Account was now sent. There is an Article on Sir W. Scott: shocking; invitissima Minerva!*