I was in Wales, as well as Scotland, during Autumn time; lived three weeks within wind of St. Germanus's old "College" (Fourteen Hundred years of age or so) and also not far fromMerthyr Tydvil,Cyclops' Hell, sootiest and horridest avatar of the Industrial Mammon I had ever anywhere seen; went through the Severn Valley; at Bath stayed a night with Landor (a proud and high old man, who charged me with express remembrances for you); saw Tennyson too, in Cumberland, with his new Wife; and other beautiful recommendable and 'questionable things;—and was dreadfully tossed about, and torn almost to tatters by the manifold brambles of my way: and so at length am here, a much- lamed man indeed! Oh my Friend, have tolerance for me, have sympathy with me; you know not quite (I imagine) what a burden mine is, or perhaps you would find this duty, which you always do, a little easier done! Be happy, be busy beside your still waters, and think kindly of me there. My nerves, health I call them, are in a sad state of disorder: alas, that is nine tenths of all the battle in this world. Courage, courage!—My Wife sends salutations to you and yours. Good be with you all always.
Your affectionate,T. Carlyle
CXLIV. Carlyle to Emerson
Chelsea, 8 July, 1851
Dear Emerson,—Don't you still remember very well that there is such a man? I know you do, and will do. But it is a ruinously long while since we have heard a word from each other;—a state of matters that ought immediately tocease.It was your turn, I think, to write? It was somebody's turn! Nay I heard lately you complained of bad eyes; and were grown abstinent of writing. Pray contradict me this. I cannot do without some regard from you while we are both here. Spite of your many sins, you are among the most human of all the beings I now know in the world;— who are a very select set, and are growing ever more so, I can inform you!
In late months, feeling greatly broken and without heart for anything weighty, I have been upon aLife of John Sterling;which will not be good for much, but will as usual gratify me by taking itself off my hands: it was one of the things I felt a kind of obligation to do, and so am thankful to have done. Here is a patch of it lying by me, if you will look at a specimen. There are four hundred or more pages (prophesies the Printer), a good manyLettersand Excerpts in the latter portion of the volume. Already half printed, wholly written; but not to come out for a couple of months yet,—all trade being at a stand till this sublime "Crystal Palace" go its ways again.—And now since we are upon the business, I wish you would mention it to E.P. Clark (is not that the name?) next time you go to Boston: if that friendly clear-eyed man have anything to say in reference to it and American Booksellers, let him say and do; he may have a Copy for anybody in about a month: ifhehave nothing to say, then let there be nothing anywhere said. For, mark O Philosopher, I expressly and with emphasis prohibityouat this stage of our history, and henceforth, unless I grow poor again. Indeed, indeed, the commercial mandate of the thing (Nature's little order on that behalf) being once fulfilled (by speaking to Clark), I do not care a snuff of tobacco how it goes, and will prefer, here as elsewhere, my night's rest to any amount of superfluous money.
This summer, as you may conjecture, has been very noisy with us, and productive of little,—the "Wind-dust-ry of all Nations" involving everything in one inane tornado. The very shopkeepers complain that there is no trade. Such a sanhedrim of windy fools from all countries of the Globe were surely never gathered in one city before. But they will go their ways again, they surely will! One sits quiet in that faith;—nay, looks abroad with a kind of pathetic grandfatherly feeling over this universal Children's Ball which the British Nation in these extraordinary circumstances is giving it self! Silence above all, silence is very behoveful! I read lately a small old brown French duodecimo, which I mean to send you by the first chance there is. The writer is a Capitaine Bossu; the production, a Journal of his experiences in "La Louisiane," "Oyo" (Ohio), and those regions, which looks very genuine, and has a strange interest to me, like some fractional Odyssey or letter.* Only a hundred years ago, and the Mississippi has changed as never valley did: in 1751 older and stranger, looked at from its present date, than Balbec or Nineveh! Say what we will, Jonathan is doing miracles (of a sort) under the sun in these times now passing.—Do you knowBartram's Travels?This is of the Seventies (1770) or so; treats ofFloridachiefly, has a wondrous kind of floundering eloquence in it; and has also grown immeasurablyold.All American libraries ought to provide themselves with that kind of book; and keep them as a kind of futurebiblicalarticle.— Finally on this head, can you tell me of anygoodBook on California? Good: I have read several bad. But that too is worthy of some wonder; that too, like the Old Bucaniers, hungers and thirsts (in ingenuous minds) to have some true record and description given of it.
————— * Bossu wrote two books which are known to the student of the history of the settlement of America; one, "Nouveaux Voyages aux Indes occidentales," Paris, 1768; the other, "Nouveaux Voyages dans l'Amerique septentrionale," Amsterdam (Paris), 1777. —————
And poor Miss Fuller, was there anyLifeever published of her? or is any competent hand engaged on it? Poor Margaret, I often remember her; and think how she is asleep now under the surges of the sea. Mazzini, as you perhaps know, is with us this summer; comes across once in the week or so, and tells me, or at least my Wife, all his news. The Roman revolution has made a man of him,—quite brightened up ever since;—and the best friendheever saw, I believe, was that same Quack-President of France, who relieved him while it was still time.
My Brother is in Annandale, working hard overDanteat last; talks of coming up hither shortly; I am myself very ill and miserable in theliverregions; very tough otherwise,—though I have now got spectacles for small print in the twilight.Eheu fugaces,—and yet whyEheu?In fact it is better to be silent.—Adieu, dear Emerson; I expect to get a great deal brisker by and by,—and in the first place to have a Missive from Boston again. My Wife sends you many regards. I am as ever,— affectionately Yours,
—T. Carlyle
CXLV. Emerson to Carlyle
Concord, 28 July, 1851
My Dear Carlyle,—You must always thank me for silence, be it never so long, and must put on it the most generous interpretations. For I am too sure of your genius and goodness, and too glad that they shine steadily for all, to importune you to make assurance sure by a private beam very often. There is very little in this village to be said to you, and, with all my love of your letters, I think it the kind part to defend you from our imbecilities,—my own, and other men's. Besides, my eyes are bad, and prone to mutiny at any hint of white paper.
And yet I owe you all my story, if story I have. I have been something of a traveler the last year, and went down the Ohio River to its mouth; walked nine miles into, and nine miles out of the Mammoth Cave, in Kentucky,—walked or sailed, for we crossed small underground streams,—and lost one day's light; then steamed up the Mississippi, five days, to Galena. In the Upper Mississippi, you are always in a lake with many islands.
"The Far West" is the right name for these verdant deserts. On all the shores, interminable silent forest. If you land, there is prairie behind prairie, forest behind forest, sites of nations, no nations. The raw bullion of nature; what we call "moral" value not yet stamped on it. But in a thousand miles the immense material values will show twenty or fifty Californias; that a good ciphering head will make one where he is. Thus at Pittsburg, on the Ohio, the "Iron" City, whither, from want of railroads, few Yankees have penetrated, every acre of land has three or four bottoms; first of rich soil; then nine feet of bituminous coal; a little lower, fourteen feet of coal; then iron, or salt; salt springs, with a valuable oil called petroleum floating on their surface. Yet this acre sells for the price of any tillage acre in Massachusetts; and, in a year, the railroads will reach it, east and west.—I came home by the great Northern Lakes and Niagara.
No books, a few lectures, each winter, I write and read. In the spring, the abomination of our Fugitive Slave Bill drove me to some writing and speech-making, without hope of effect, but to clear my own skirts. I am sorry I did not print whilst it was yet time. I am now told that the time will come again, more's the pity. Now I am trying to make a sort of memoir of Margaret Fuller, or my part in one;—for Channing and Ward are to do theirs. Without either beauty or genius, she had a certain wealth and generosity of nature which have left a kind of claim on our consciences to build her a cairn. And this reminds me that I am to write a note to Mazzini on this matter; and, as you say you see him, you must charge yourself with delivering it. What we do must be ended by October. You too are working for Sterling. It is right and kind. I learned so much from the New YorkTribune,and, a few days after, was on the point of writing to you, provoked by a foolish paragraph which appeared in Rufus Griswold's Journal, (New York,) purporting that R.W.E. possessed important letters of Sterling, without which Thomas Carlyle could not write the Life. What scrap of hearsay about contents of Sterling's letters to me, or that I had letters, this paltry journalist swelled into this puff-ball, I know not. He once came to my house, and, since that time, may have known Margaret Fuller in New York; but probably never saw any letter of Sterling's or heard the contents of any. I have not read again Sterling's letters, which I keep as good Lares in a special niche, but I have no recollection of anything that would be valuable to you. For the American Public for the Book, I think it important that you should take the precise step of sending Phillips and Sampson the early copy, and at the earliest. I saw them, and also E.P. Clark, and put them in communication, and Clark is to write you at once.
Having got so far in my writing to you, I do not know but I shall gain heart, and write more letters over sea. You will think my sloth suicidal enough. So many men as I learned to value in your country,—so many as offered me opportunities of intercourse,— and I lose them all by silence. Arthur Helps is a chief benefactor of mine. I wrote him a letter by Ward,—who brought the letter back. I ought to thank John Carlyle, not only for me, but for a multitude of good men and women here who read hisInfernoduly. W.E. Forster sent me his Penn Pamphlet; I sent it to Bancroft, who liked it well, only he thought Forster might have made a still stronger case. Clough I prize at a high rate, the man and his poetry, but write not. Wilkinson I thought a man of prodigious talent, who somehow held it and so taught others to hold it cheap, as we do one of those bushel-basket memories which school-boys and school-girls often show,—and we stop their mouths lest they be troublesome with their alarming profusion. But there is no need of beginning to count the long catalogue. Kindest, kindest remembrance to my benefactress, also in your house, and health and strength and victory to you.
Your affectionate,Waldo Emerson
CXLVI. Carlyle to Emerson
Great Malvern, Worcestershire, 25 August, 1851
Dear Emerson,—Many thanks for your Letter, which found me here about a week ago, and gave a full solution to my bibliopolic difficulties. However sore your eyes, or however taciturn your mood, there is no delay of writing when any service is to be done by it! In fact you are very good to me, and always were, in all manner of ways; for which I do, as I ought, thank the Upper Powers and you. That truly has been and is one of the possessions of my life in this perverse epoch of the world….
I have sent off by John Chapman a Copy of theLife of Sterling,which is all printed and ready, but is not to appear till the first week of October…. Along with theSheetswas a poor little French Book for you,—Book of a poor NavalMississippiFrenchman, one "Bossu," I think; written only a Century ago, yet which already seemed old as the Pyramids in reference to those strange fast-growing countries. I read it as a kind of defacedromance;very thin and lean, but alltrue,and very marvelous as such.
It is above three weeks since my Wife and I left London, (the Printer having done,) and came hither with the purpose of a month of what is called "Water Cure"; for which this place, otherwise extremely pleasant and wholesome, has become celebrated of late years. Dr. Gully, the pontiff of the business in our Island, warmly encouraged my purpose so soon as he heard of it; nay, urgently offered at once that both of us should become his own guests till the experiment were tried: and here accordingly we are; I water-curing, assiduously walking on the sunny mountains, drinking of the clear wells, not to speak of wet wrappages, solitary sadsteepages,and other singular procedures; my Wife not meddling for her own behoof, but only seeing me do it. These have been three of the idlest weeks I ever spent, and there is still one to come: after which we go northward to Lancashire, and across the Border where my good old Mother still expects me; and so, after some little visiting and dawdling, hope to find ourselves home again before September end, and the inexpressible Glass Palace with its noisy inanity have taken itself quite away again. It was no increase of ill-health that drove me hither, rather the reverse; but I have long been minded to try this thing: and now I think the result will be,—zeropretty nearly, and one imagination the less. My long walks, my strenuous idleness, have certainly done me good; nor has the "water" done me anyill,which perhaps is much to say of it. For the rest, it is a strange quasi-monastic—godless and yetdevotional—way of life which human creatures have here, and useful to them beyond doubt. I foresee, this "Water Cure," under better forms, will become theRamadhanof the overworked unbelieving English in time coming; an institution they were dreadfully in want of, this long while!—We had Twisleton* here (often speaking of you), who is off to America again; will sail, I think, along with this Letter; a semi-articulate but solid- minded worthy man. We have other officials and otherlitterateurs(T.B. Macaulay in his hired villa for one): but the mind rather shuns than seeks them, one finds solitary quasi- devotion preferable, and [Greek], as Pindar had it!
—————- * The late Hon. Edward Twisleton, a man of high character and large attainments, and with a personal disposition that won the respect and affection of a wide circle of friends on both sides of the Atlantic. He was the author of a curious and learned treatise entitled "The Tongue not Essential to Speech," and his remarkable volume on "The Handwriting of Junius" seems to have effectually closed a long controversy. ————-
Richard Milnes is married, about two weeks ago, and gone to Vienna for a jaunt. His wife, a Miss Crewe (Lord Crewe's sister), about forty, pleasant, intelligent, and rather rich: that is the end of Richard's long first act. Alfred Tennyson, perhaps you heard, is gone to Italy with his wife: their baby died or was dead-born; they found England wearisome: Alfred has been taken up on the top of the wave, and a good deal jumbled about since you were here. Item Thackeray; who is coming over to lecture to you: a mad world, my Masters! Your Letter to Mazzini was duly despatched; and we hear from him that he will write to you, on the subject required, without delay. Browning and his wife, home from Florence, are both in London at present; mean to live in Paris henceforth for some time. They had seen something both of Margaret and her d'Ossoli, and appeared to have a true and lively interest in them; Browning spoke a long while to me, with emphasis, on the subject: I think it was I that had introduced poor Margaret to them. I said he ought to send these reminiscences to America,—that was the night before we left London, three weeks ago; his answer gave me the impression there had been some hindrance somewhere. Accordingly, when your Letter and Mazzini's reached me here, I wrote to Browning urgently on the subject: but he informs me that theyhavesent all their reminiscences, at the request of Mr. Story; so that it is already all well.—Dear Emerson, you see I am at the bottom of my paper. I will write to you again before long; we cannot let you lie fallow in that manner altogether. Have you got properspectaclesfor your eyes? I have adopted that beautiful symbol of old age, and feel myself very venerable: take care of your eyes!
Yours ever,T. Carlyle
CXLVII. Emerson to Carlyle
Concord, 14 April, 1852
My Dear Carlyle,—I have not grown so callous by my sulky habit, but that I know where my friends are, and who can help me, in time of need. And I have to crave your good offices today, and in a matter relating once more to Margaret Fuller…. You were so kind as to interest yourself, many months ago, to set Mazzini and Browning on writing their Reminiscences for us. But we never heard from either of them. Lately I have learned, by way of Sam Longfellow, in Paris, brother of our poet Longfellow, that Browning assured him that he did write and send a memoir to this country,—to whom, I know not. It never arrived at the hands of the Fullers, nor of Story, Channing, or me;—though the book was delayed in the hope of such help. I hate that his paper should be lost.
The little FrenchVoyage,&c. of Bossu, I got safely, and compared its pictures with my own, at the Mississippi, the Illinois, and Chicago. It is curious and true enough, no doubt, though its Indians are rather dim and vague, and "Messieurs Sauvages" Good Indians we have in Alexander Henry'sTravels in Canada,and in our modern Catlin, and the best Western America, perhaps, in F.A. Michaux,Voyage a l'ouest des monts Alleghanis,and in Fremont. But it was California I believe you asked about, and, after looking at Taylor, Parkman, and the rest, I saw that the only course is to read them all, and every private letter that gets into the newspapers. So there was nothing to say.
I rejoiced with the rest of mankind in theLife of Sterling,and now peace will be to his Manes, down in this lower sphere. Yet I see well that I should have held to his opinion, in all those conferences where you have so quietly assumed the palms. It is said: here, that you work upon Frederick the Great?? However that be, health, strength, love, joy, and victory to you.
—R.W. Emerson
CXLVIII. Carlyle to Emerson
Chelsea, 7 May, 1852
Dear Emerson,—I was delighted at the sight of your hand again. My manifold sins against you, involuntary all of them I may well say, are often enough present to my sad thoughts; and a kind of remorse is mixed with the other sorrow,—as if I could havehelpedgrowing to be, by aid of time and destiny, the grim Ishmaelite I am, and so shocking your serenity by my ferocities! I admit you were like an angel to me, and absorbed in the beautifulest manner all thunder-clouds into the depths of your immeasurable a ether;—and it is indubitable I love you very well, and have long done, and mean to do. And on the whole you will have to rally yourself into some kind of Correspondence with me again; I believe you will find that also to be a commanded duty by and by! To me at any rate, I can say, it is a great want, and adds perceptibly to the sternness of these years: deep as is my dissent from your Gymnosophist view of Heaven and Earth, I find an agreement that swallows up all conceivable dissents; in the whole world I hardly get, to my spoken human word, any other word of response which is authenticallyhuman.God help us, this is growing a very lonely place, this distracted dog- kennel of a world! And it is no joy to me to see it about to have its throat cut for its immeasurable devilries; that is not a pleasant process to be concerned in either more or less,— considering above all how many centuries, base and dismal all of them, it is like to take! NeverthelessMarchons,—and swift too, if we have any speed, for the sun is sinking…. Poor Margaret, that is a strange tragedy that history of hers; and has many traits of the Heroic in it, though it is wild as the prophecy of a Sibyl. Such a predetermination toeatthis big Universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her heart could conceive, I have not before seen in any human soul. Her "mountain me" indeed:— but her courage too is high and clear, her chivalrous nobleness indeed is great; her veracity, in its deepest sense,a toute epreuve.—Your Copy of the Book* came to me at last (to my joy): I had already read it; there was considerable notice taken of it here; and one half-volume of it (and I grieve to say only one, written by a man called Emerson) was completely approved by me and innumerable judges. The rest of the Book is not without considerable geniality and merits; but one wanted a clear concise Narrative beyond all other merits; and if you ask here (except in that half-volume) about any fact, you are answered (so to speak) not in words, but by a symbolic tune on the bagpipe, symbolic burst of wind-music from the brass band;—which is not the plan at all!—What can have become of Mazzini's Letter, which he certainly did write and despatched to you, is not easily conceivable. Still less in the case of Browning: for Browning and his Wife did also write; I myself in the end of last July, having heard him talk kindly and well of poor Margaret and her Husband, took the liberty on your behalf of asking him to put something down on paper; and he informed me, then and repeatedly since, he had already done it,—at the request of Mrs. Story, I think. His address at present is, "No. 138 Avenue des Champs Elysees, a Paris," if your American travelers still thought of inquiring.—Adieu, dear Emerson, till next week.
Yours ever,T. Carlyle
———— * "The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli." ————
CXLIX. Emerson to Carlyle*
Concord, May [?], 1852
You make me happy with your loving thoughts and meanings towards me. I have always thanked the good star which made us early neighbors, in some sort, in time and space. And the beam is twice warmed by your vigorous good-will, which has steadily kept clear, kind eyes on me.
———— * From an imperfect rough draft. ————
It is good to be born in good air and outlook, and not less with a civilization, that is, with one poet still living in the world. O yes, and I feel all the solemnity and vital cheer of the benefit.—If only the mountains of water and of land and the steeper mountains of blighted and apathized moods would permit a word to pass now and then. It is very fine for you to tax yourself with all those incompatibilities. I like that Thor should make comets and thunder, as well as Iduna apples, or Heimdal his rainbow bridge, and your wrath and satire has all too much realism in it, than that we can flatter ourselves by disposing of you as partial and heated. Nor is it your fault that you do a hero's work, nor do we love you less if we cannot help you in it. Pity me, O strong man! I am of a puny constitution half made up, and as I from childhood knew,—not a poet but a lover of poetry, and poets, and merely serving as writer, &c. in this empty America, before the arrival of the poets. You must not misconstrue my silences, but thank me for them all, as a true homage to your diligence which I love to defend…
She* had such reverence and love for Landor that I do not know but at any moment in her natural life she would have sunk in the sea, for an ode from him; and now this most propitious cake is offered to her Manes. The loss of the notes of Browning and of Mazzini, which you confirm, astonishes me.
————- * Margaret Fuller. The break in continuity is in the rough draft. ————-
CL. Carlyle to Emerson
Chelsea, 25 June, 1852
Dear Emerson…… You are a bornenthusiast,as quiet as you are; and it will continue so, at intervals, to the end. I admire your sly low-voiced sarcasm too;—in short, I love the sternly-gentle close-buttoned man very well, as I have always done, and intend to continue doing!—Pray observe therefore, and lay it to heart as a practical fact, that you are bound to persevere in writing to me from time to time; and will never get it given up, how sulky soever you grow, while we both remain in this world. Do not I very well understand all that you say about "apathized moods," &c.? The gloom of approaching old age (approaching, nay arriving with some of us) is very considerable upon a man; and on the whole one contrives to take the very ugliest view, now and then, of all beautifulest things; and to shut one's lips with a kind of grim defiance, a kind of imperial sorrow which is almost like felicity,—so completely and composedly wretched, one is equal to the very gods! These too are necessary, moods to a man. But the Earth withal is verdant, sun-beshone; and the Son of Adam has his place on it, and his tasks and recompenses in it, to the close;—as one remembers by and by, too. On the whole, I am infinitely solitary; but not more heavy laden than I have all along been, perhaps rather less so; I could fancy even old age to be beautiful, and to have a real divineness: for the rest, I say always, I cannot part with you, however it go; and so, in brief, you must get into the way of holding yourself obliged as formerly to a kind ofdialoguewith me; and speak, on paper since not otherwise, the oftenest you can. Let that be a point settled.
I am notwritingon Frederic the Great; nor at all practically contemplating to do so. But, being in a reading mood after those furiousPamphlets(which have procured me showers of abuse from all the extensive genus Stupid in this country, and not done me any other mischief, but perhaps good), and not being capable of reading except in a train andaboutsome object of interest to me,—I took to reading, near a year ago, about Frederick, as I had twice in my life done before; and have, in a loose way, tumbled up an immense quantity of shot rubbish on that field, and still continue. Not with much decisive approach to Frederick'sself,I am still afraid! The man looks brilliant and noble to me; but howlovehim, or the sad wreck he lived and worked in? I do not even yetseehim clearly; and to try making others see him—?—Yet Voltaire and hearethe celestial element of the poor Eighteenth Century; poor souls. I confess also to a real love for Frederick's dumb followers: the PrussianSoldiery.—I often say to myself, "Were notherethe real priests and virtuous martyrs of that loud-babbling rotten generation!" And so it goes on; when to end, or in what to end, God knows.
Adieu, dear Emerson. A blockhead (by mistake) has been let in, and has consumed all my time. Good be ever with you and yours.
—T. Carlyle
CLI. Emerson to Carlyle
Concord, 19 April, 1853
My Dear Friend,—As I find I never write a letter except at the dunning of the Penny Post,—which is the pest of the century,—I have thought lately of crossing to England to excuse to you my negligence of your injunction, which so flattered me by its affectionateness a year ago. I was to write once a month. My own disobedience is wonderful, and explains to me all the sins of omission of the whole world. The levity with which we can let fall into disuse such a sacrament as the exchange of greeting at short periods, is a kind of magnanimity, and should be an astonishing argument of the "Immortality"; and I wonder how it has escaped the notice of philosophers. But what had I, dear wise man, to tell you? What, but that life was still tolerable; still absurdly sweet; still promising, promising, to credulous idleness;—but step of mine taken in a true direction, or clear solution of any the least secret,—none whatever. I scribble always a little,—much less than formerly,—and I did within a year or eighteen months write a chapter on Fate, which—if we all live long enough, that is, you, and I, and the chapter—I hope to send you in fair print. Comfort yourself—as you will—you will survive the reading, and will be a sure proof that the nut is not cracked. For when we find out what Fate is, I suppose, the Sphinx and we are done for; and Sphinx, Oedipus, and world ought, by good rights, to roll down the steep into the sea.
But I was going to say, my neglect of your request will show you how little saliency is in my weeks and months. They are hardly distinguished in memory other than as a running web out of a loom, a bright stripe for day, a dark stripe for night, and, when it goes faster, even these run together into endless gray… I went lately to St. Louis and saw the Mississippi again. The powers of the River, the insatiate craving for nations of men to reap and cure its harvests, the conditions it imposes,—for it yields to no engineering,—are interesting enough. The Prairie exists to yield the greatest possible quantity of adipocere. For corn makes pig, pig is the export of all the land, and you shall see the instant dependence of aristocracy and civility on the fat four legs. Workingmen, ability to do the work of the River, abounded. Nothing higher was to be thought of. America is incomplete. Room for us all, since it has not ended, nor given sign of ending, in bard or hero. 'T is a wild democracy, the riot of mediocrities, and none of your selfish Italies and Englands, where an age sublimates into a genius, and the whole population is made into Paddies to feed his porcelain veins, by transfusion from their brick arteries. Our few fine persons are apt to die. Horatio Greenough, a sculptor, whose tongue was far cunninger in talk than his chisel to carve, and who inspired great hopes, died two months ago at forty-seven years. Nature has only so much vital force, and must dilute it, if it is to be multiplied into millions. "The beautiful is never plentiful." On the whole, I say to myself, that our conditions in America are not easier or less expensive than the European. For the poor scholar everywhere must be compromise or alternation, and, after many remorses, the consoling himself that there has been pecuniary honesty, and that things might have been worse. But no; we must think much better things than these. Let Lazarus believe that Heaven does not corrupt into maggots, and that heroes do not succumb.
Clough is here, and comes to spend a Sunday with me, now and then. He begins to have pupils, and, if his courage holds out, will have as many as he wants…. I have written hundreds of pages about England and America, and may send them to you in print. And now be good and write me once more, and I think I will never cease to write again. And give my homage to Jane Carlyle.
Ever yours,R.W. Emerson
CLII. Carlyle to Emerson
Chelsea, 13 May, 1853
Dear Emerson,—The sight of your handwriting was a real blessing to me, after so long an abstinence. You shall not know all the sad reflections I have made upon your silence within the last year. I never doubted your fidelity of heart; your genial deep and friendly recognition of my bits of merits, and my bits of sufferings, difficulties and obstructions; your forgiveness of my faults; or in fact that you ever would forget me, or cease to think kindly of me: but it seemed as if practicallyOld Agehad come upon the scene here too; and as if upon the whole one must make up one's mind to know that all this likewise had fallen silent, and could be possessed henceforth only on those new terms. Alas, there goes much over, year after year, into the regions of the Immortals; inexpressibly beautiful, but also inexpressibly sad. I have not many voices to commune with in the world. In fact I have properly no voice at all; and yours, I have often said, was theuniqueamong my fellow-creatures, from which came full response, and discourse of reason: thesolitudeone lives in, if one has any spiritual thought at all, is very great in these epochs!—The truth is, moreover, I bought spectacles to myself about two years ago (bad print in candle- light having fairly become troublesome to me); much may lie in that! "The buying of your first pair of spectacles," I said to an old Scotch gentleman, "is an important epoch; like the buying of your first razor."—"Yes," answered he, "but not quite so joyful perhaps!"—Well, well, I have heard from you again; and you promise to be again constant in writing. Shall I believe you, this time? Do it, and shame the Devil! I really am persuaded it will do yourself good; and to me I know right well, and have always known, what it will do. The gaunt lonesomeness of this Midnight Hour, in the ugly universalsnoringhum of the overfilled deep-sunk Posterity of Adam, renders an articulate speaker precious indeed! Watchman, what sayest thou, then? Watchman, what of the night?—
Your glimpses of the huge unmanageable Mississippi, of the huge ditto Model Republic, have here and there something of theepicin them,—ganz nach meinem Sinne.I see you do not dissent from me in regard to that latter enormous Phenomenon, except on the outer surface, and in the way of peaceably instead of _un_peaceably accepting the same. Alas, all the world is a "republic of the Mediocrities," and always was;—you may see whatits"universal suffrage" is and has been, by looking into all the ugly mud-ocean (with some old weathercocks atop) that nowis:the world wholly (if we think of it) is the exact stamp of men wholly, and of thesincerestheart-tongue-and-hand "suffrage" they could give about it, poor devils!—I was much struck with Plato, last year, and his notions about Democracy: mere Latter-Day Pamphletsaxa et faces(readfaeces,if you like) refined into empyrean radiance and lightning of the gods!— I, for my own part, perceive the use of all this too, the inevitability of all this; but perceive it (at the present height it has attained) to be disastrous withal, to be horrible and even damnable. That Judas Iscariot should come and slap Jesus Christ on the shoulder in a familiar manner; that all heavenliest nobleness should be flung out into the muddy streets there to jostle elbows with all thickest-skinned denizens of chaos, and get itself at every turn trampled into the gutters and annihilated:—alas, thereverseof all this was, is, and ever will be, the strenuous effort and most solemn heart-purpose of every good citizen in every country of the world,—and willreappearconspicuously as such (in New England and in Old, first of all, as I calculate), when once this malodorous melancholy "Uncle Tommery" is got all well put by! Which will take some time yet, I think.—And so we will leave it.
I went to Germany last autumn; notseekinganything very definite; rather merely flying from certain troops of carpenters, painters, bricklayers, &c., &c., who had made a lodgment in this poor house; and have not even yet got their incalculable riot quite concluded. Sorrow on them,—and no return to these poor premises of mine till I have quite left!—In Germany I found but little; and suffered, from six weeks of sleeplessness in German beds, &c., &c., a great deal. Indeed I seem to myself never yet to have quite recovered. The Rhine which I honestly ascended from Rotterdam to Frankfort was, as I now find, my chief Conquest the beautifulest river in the Earth, I do believe; and my first idea of a World-river. It is many fathoms deep, broader twice over than the Thames here at high water; and rolls along, mirror-smooth (except that, in looking close, you will find ten thousand little eddies in it), voiceless, swift, with trim banks, through the heart of Europe, and of the Middle Ages wedded to the Present Age: such an image of calmpower(to say nothing of its other properties) I find I had never seen before. The old Cities too are a little beautiful to me, in spite of my state of nerves; honest, kindly people too, but sadly short of our and yourdespatch-of-businesstalents,—a really painful defect in the long run. I was on two of Fritz's Battle-fields, moreover: Lobositz in Bohemia, and Kunersdorf by Frankfurt on the Oder; but did not, especially in the latter case, make much of that. Schiller's death-chamber, Goethe's sad Court-environment; above all, Luther's little room in theWartburg(I believe I actually had tears in my eyes there, and kissed the old oak-table, being in a very flurried state of nerves), my belief was that under the Canopy there was not at present soholya spot as that same. Of human souls I found none specially beautiful to me at all, at all,—such my sad fate! Of learned professors, I saw little, and that little was more than enough. Tieck at Berlin, an old man, lame on a Sofa, I did love, and do; he is an exception, could I have seen much of him. But on the wholeUniversal Puseyismseemed to me the humor of German, especially of Berlin thinkers;—and I had some quite portentous specimens of that kind,—unconscious specimens of four hundred quack power! Truly and really the Prussian Soldiers, with their intelligentsilence,with the touches of effective Spartanism I saw or fancied in them, were the class of people that pleased me best. But see, my sheet is out! I am still reading, reading, most nightmare Books about Fritz; but as to writing,—Ach Gott!Never, never.—Clough is coming home, I hope.—Write soon, if you be not enchanted!
Yours ever,T. Carlyle
CLIIa. Emerson to Carlyle
Concord, 10 August, 1853
My Dear Carlyle,—Your kindest letter, whose date I dare not count back to,—perhaps it was May,—I have just read again, to be deeply touched by its noble tragic tone of goodness to me, not without new wonder at my perversity, and terror at what both may be a-forging to strike me. My slowness to write is a distemper that reaches all my correspondence, and not that with you only, though the circumstance is not worth stating, because, if I ceased to write to all the rest, there would yet be good reason for writing to you. I believe the reason of this recusancy is the fear of disgusting my friends, as with a book open always at the same page. For I have some experiences, that my interest in thoughts—and to an end, perhaps, only of new thoughts and thinking—outlasts that of all my reasonable neighbors, and offends, no doubt, by unhealthy pertinacity. But though rebuked by a daily reduction to an absurd solitude, and by a score of disappointments with intellectual people, and in the face of a special hell provided for me in the Swedenborg Universe, I am yet confirmed in my madness by the scope and satisfaction I find in a conversation once or twice in five years, if so often; and so we find or pick what we call our proper path, though it be only from stone to stone, or from island to island, in a very rude, stilted, and violent fashion. With such solitariness and frigidities, you may judge I was glad to see Clough here, with whom I had established some kind of robust working-friendship, and who had some great permanent values for me. Had he not taken me by surprise and fled in a night, I should have done what I could to block his way. I am too sure he will not return. The first months comprise all the shocks of disappointment that are likely to disgust a new-comer. The sphere of opportunity opens slowly, but to a man of his abilities and culture—rare enough here—with the sureness of chemistry. The Giraffe entering Paris wore the label, "Eh bien, messieurs, il n'y a qu'une bete de plus!" And Oxonians are cheap in London; but here, the eternal economy of sending things where they are wanted makes a commanding claim. Do not suffer him to relapse into London. He had made himself already cordially welcome to many good people, and would have soon made his own place. He had just established his valise at my house, and was to come—the gay deceiver—once a fortnight for his Sunday; and his individualities and his nationalities are alike valuable to me. I beseech you not to commend his unheroic retreat.
I have lately made, one or two drafts on your goodness,—which I hate to do, both because you meet them so generously, and because you never give me an opportunity of revenge,—and mainly in the case of Miss Bacon, who has a private history that entitles her to high respect, and who could be helped only by facilitating her Shakespeare studies, in which she has the faith and ardor of a discoverer. Bancroft was to have given her letters to Hallam, but gave one to Sir H. Ellis. Everett, I believe, gave her one to Mr. Grote; and when I told her what I remembered hearing of Spedding, she was eager to see him; which access I knew not how to secure, except through you. She wrote me that she prospers in all things, and had just received at once a summons to meet Spedding at your house. But do not fancy that I send any one to you heedlessly; for I value your time at its rate to nations, and refuse many more letters than I give. I shall not send you any more people without good reason.
Your visit to Germany will stand you in stead, when the annoyances of the journey are forgotten, and, in spite of your disclaimers, I am preparing to read your history of Frederic. You are an inveterate European, and rightfully stand for your polity and antiquities and culture: and I have long since forborne to importune you with America, as if it were a humorous repetition of Johnson's visit to Scotland. And yet since Thackeray's adventure, I have often thought how you would bear the pains and penalties; and have painted out your march triumphal. I was at New York, lately, for a few days, and fell into some traces of Thackeray, who has made a good mark in this country by a certain manly blurting out of his opinion in various companies, where so much honesty was rare and useful. I am sorry never once to have been in the same town with him whilst he was here. I hope to see him, if he comes again. New York would interest you, as I am told it did him; you both less and more. The "society" there is at least self-pleased, and its own; it has a contempt of Boston, and a very modest opinion of London. There is already all the play and fury that belong to great wealth. A new fortune drops into the city every day; no end is to palaces, none to diamonds, none to dinners and suppers. All Spanish America discovers that only in the U. States, of all the continent, is safe investment; and money gravitates therefore to New York. The Southern naphtha, too, comes in as an ingredient, and lubricates manners and tastes to that degree, that Boston is hated for stiffness, and excellence in luxury is rapidly attained. Of course, dining, dancing, equipaging, etc. are the exclusive beatitudes,—and Thackeray will not cure us of this distemper. Have you a physician that can? Are you a physician, and will you come? If you will come, cities will go out to meet you.
And now I see I have so much to say to you that I ought to write once a month, and I must begin at this point again incontinently.
Ever yours,R.W. Emerson
CLIII. Carlyle to Emerson
Chelsea, London, 9 September, 1853
Dear Emerson,—Your Letter came ten days ago; very kind, and however late, surely right welcome! You ought to stir yourself up a little, and actually begin to speak to me again. If we are getting old, that is no reason why we should fall silent, and entirely abstruse to one another. Alas, I do not find as I grow older that the number of articulate-speaking human souls increases around me, in proportion to the inarticulate and palavering species! I am often abundantly solitary in heart; and regret the old days when we used to speak oftener together.
I have not quitted Town this year at all; have resisted calls to Scotland both of a gay and a sad description (for the Ashburtons are gone to John of Groat's House, or the ScottishThule,to rusticate and hunt; and, alas, in poor old Annandale a tragedy seems preparing for me, and the thing I have dreaded all my days is perhaps now drawing nigh, ah me!)—I felt so utterly broken and disgusted with the jangle of last year's locomotion, I judged it would be better to sit obstinately still, and let my thoughtssettle(into sediment and into clearness, as it might be); and so, in spite of great and peculiar noises moreover, here I am and remain. London is not a bad place at all in these months,—with its long clean streets, green parks, and nobody in them, or nobody one has ever seen before. Out of La Trappe, which does not suit a Protestant man, there is perhaps no place where one can be so perfectly alone. I might study even but, as I said, there are noises going on; alastdesperate spasmodic effort of building,—a new top-story to the house, out of which is to be made one "spacious room" (so they call it, though it is under twenty feet square) where there shall be airad libitum,light from the sky, and nosound,not even that of the Cremorne Cannons, shall find access to me any more! Such is the prophecy; may the gods grant it! We shall see now in about a month;—then adieu to mortar-tubs to all Eternity:—I endure the thing, meanwhile, as well as I can; might run to a certain rural retreat near by, if I liked at any time; but do not yet: the worst uproar here is but a trifle to that of German inns, and horrible squeaking, choking railway trains; and one does not go to seek this,thisis here of its own will, and for a purpose! Seriously, I had for twelve years had such a sound-proof inaccessible apartment schemed out in my head; and last year, under a poor, helpless builder, had finally given it up: but Chelsea, as London generally, swelling out as if it were mad, grows every year noisier; agoodbuilder turned up, and with a last paroxysm of enthusiasm I set him to. My notion is, he will succeed; in which case, it will be a great possession to me for the rest of my life. Alas, this is not the kind ofsilenceI could have coveted, and could once get,—with green fields and clear skies to accompany it! But one must take such as can be had,—and thank the gods. Even so, my friend. In the course of about a year of that garret sanctuary, I hope to have swept away much litter from my existence: in fact I am already, by dint of mere obstinate quiescence in such circumstances as there are, intrinsically growing fairly sounder in nerves. What a business a poor human being has with those nerves of his, with that crazy clay tabernacle of his! Enough, enough; there will be all Eternity to rest in, as Arnauld said: "Why in such a fuss, little sir?"
You "apologize" for sending people to me: O you of little faith! Never dream of such a thing nay, whomdidyou send? The Cincinnati Lecturer* I had provided for with Owen; they would have been glad to hear him, on the Cedar forests, on the pigs making rattlesnakes into bacon, and the general adipocere question, under any form, at the Albemarle Street rooms;—and he never came to hand. As for Miss Bacon, we find her, with her modest shy dignity, with her solid character and strange enterprise, a real acquisition; and hope we shall now see more of her, now that she has come nearer to us to lodge. I have not in my life seen anything so tragicallyquixoticas her Shakespeare enterprise: alas, alas, there can be nothing but sorrow, toil, and utter disappointment in it for her! I do cheerfully what I can;—which is far more than sheasksof me (for I have not seen a prouder silent soul);—but there is not the least possibility of truth in the notion she has taken up: and the hope of ever proving it, or finding the least document that countenances it, is equal to that of vanquishing the windmills by stroke of lance. I am often truly sorry about the poor lady: but she troubles nobody with her difficulties, with her theories; she must try the matter to the end, and charitable souls must further her so far.
————- * Mr. O.M. Mitchell, the astronomer. ————-
Clough is settled in his Office; gets familiarized to it rapidly (he says), and seems to be doing well. I see little of him hitherto; I did not, and will not, try to influence him in his choice of countries; but I think he is now likely to continue here, and here too he may do us some good. Of America, at least of New England, I can perceive he has brought away an altogether kindly, almost filial impression,—especially of a certain man who lives in that section of the Earth. More power to his elbow!—Thackeray has very rarely come athwart me since his return: he is a big fellow, soul and body; of many gifts and qualities (particularly in the Hogarth line, with a dash of Sterne superadded), of enormousappetitewithal, and very uncertain and chaotic in all points except hisouter breeding,which is fixed enough, andperfectaccording to the modern English style. I rather dread explosions in his history. Abig,fierce, weeping, hungry man; not a strong one.Ay de mi!But I must end, I must end. Your Letter awakened in me, while reading it, one mad notion. I said to myself: Well, if I live to finish this Frederic impossibility, or even to fling it fairly into the fire, why should not I go, in my old days, and see Concord, Yankeeland, and that man again, after all!—Adieu, dear friend; all good be with you and yours always.
—T. Carlyle
CLIV. Emerson to Carlyle
Concord, 11 March, 1854
My Dear Carlyle,—The sight of Mr. Samuel Laurence, the day before yesterday, in New York, and of your head among his sketches, set me on thinking which had some pain where should be only cheer. For Mr. Laurence I hailed his arrival, on every account. I wish to see a good man whom you prize; and I like to have good Englishmen come to America, which, of all countries, after their own, has the best claim to them. He promises to come and see me, and has begun most propitiously in New York. For you,—I have too much constitutional regard and —-, not to feel remorse for my short-comings and slow-comings, and I remember the maxim which the French stole from our Indians,—and it was worth stealing,—"Let not the grass grow on the path of friendship." Ah! my brave giant, you can never understand the silence and forbearances of such as are not giants. To those to whom we owe affection, let us be dumb until we are strong, though we should never be strong. I hate mumped and measled lovers. I hate cramp in all men,—most in myself.
And yet I should have been pushed to write without Samuel Laurence; for I lately looked intoJesuitism,a Latter-Day Pamphlet, and found why you like those papers so well. I think you have cleared your skirts; it is a pretty good minority of one, enunciating with brilliant malice what shall be the universal opinion of the next edition of mankind. And the sanity was so manifest, that I felt that the over-gods had cleared their skirts also to this generation, in not leaving themselves without witness, though without this single voice perhaps I should not acquit them. Also I pardon the world that reads the book as though it read it not, when I see your inveterated humors. It required courage and required conditions that feuilletonists are not the persons to name or qualify, this writing Rabelais in 1850. And to do this alone.—You must even pitch your tune to suit yourself. We must let Arctic Navigators and deepsea divers wear what astonishing coats, and eat what meats—wheat or whale— they like, without criticism.
I read further, sidewise and backwards, in these pamphlets, without exhausting them. I have not ceased to think of the great warm heart that sends them forth, and which I, with others, sometimes tag with satire, and with not being warm enough for this poor world;—I too,—though I know its meltings to-me-ward. Then I learned that the newspapers had announced the death of your mother (which I heard of casually on the Rock River, Illinois), and that you and your brother John had been with her in Scotland. I remembered what you had once and again said of her to me, and your apprehensions of the event which has come. I can well believe you were grieved. The best son is not enough a son. My mother died in my house in November, who had lived with me all my life, and kept her heart and mind clear, and her own, until the end. It is very necessary that we should have mothers,—we that read and write,—to keep us from becoming paper. I had found that age did not make that she should die without causing me pain. In my journeying lately, when I think of home the heart is taken out.
Miss Bacon wrote me in joyful fulness of the cordial kindness and aid she had found at your hands, and at your wife's; and I have never thanked you, and much less acknowledged her copious letter,—copious with desired details. Clough, too, wrote about you, and I have not written to him since his return to England. You will see how total is my ossification. Meantime I have nothing to tell you that can explain this mild palsy. I worked for a time on my English Notes with a view of printing, but was forced to leave them to go read some lectures in Philadelphia and some Western towns. I went out Northwest to great countries which I had not visited before; rode one day, fault of broken railroads, in a sleigh, sixty-five miles through the snow, by Lake Michigan, (seeing how prairies and oak-openings look in winter,) to reach Milwaukee; "the world there was done up in large lots," as a settler told me. The farmer, as he is now a colonist and has drawn from his local necessities great doses of energy, is interesting, and makes the heroic age for Wisconsin. He lives on venison and quails. I was made much of, as the only man of the pen within five hundred miles, and by rarity worth more than venison and quails.
Greeley of theNew York Tribuneis the right spiritual father of all this region; he prints and disperses one hundred and ten thousand newspapers in one day,—multitudes of them in these very parts. He had preceded me, by a few days, and people had flocked together, coming thirty and forty miles to hear him speak; as was right, for he does all their thinking and theory for them, for two dollars a year. Other than Colonists, I saw no man. "There are no singing birds in the prairie," I truly heard. All the life of the land and water had distilled no thought. Younger and better, I had no doubt been tormented to read and speak their sense for them. Now I only gazed at them and their boundless land.
One good word closed your letter in September, which ought to have had an instant reply, namely, that you might come westward when Frederic was disposed of. Speed Frederic, then, for all reasons and for this! America is growing furiously, town and state; new Kansas, new Nebraska looming up in these days, vicious politicians seething a wretched destiny for them already at Washington. The politicians shall be sodden, the States escape, please God! The fight of slave and freeman drawing nearer, the question is sharply, whether slavery or whether freedom shall be abolished. Come and see. Wealth, which is always interesting, for from wealth power refuses to be divorced, is on a new scale. Californian quartz mountains dumped down in New York to be repiled architecturally along shore from Canada to Cuba, and thence west to California again. John Bull interests you at home, and is all your subject. Come and see the Jonathanization of John. What, you scorn all this? Well, then, come and see a few good people, impossible to be seen on any other shore, who heartily and always greet you. There is a very serious welcome for you here. And I too shall wake from sleep. My wife entreats that an invitation shall go from her to you.
Faithfully yours,R.W. Emerson
CLV. Carlyle to Emerson
Chelsea, 8 April, 1854
Dear Emerson,—It was a morning not like any other which lay round it, a morning to be marked white, that one, about a week ago, when your Letter came to me; a word from you yet again, after so long a silence! On the whole, I perceive you will not utterly give up answering me, but will rouse yourself now and then to a word of human brotherhood on my behalf, so long as we both continue in this Planet. And I declare, the Heavens will reward you; and as to me, I will be thankful for what I get, and submissive to delays and to all things: all things are good compared with flat want in that respect. It remains true, and will remain, what I have often told you, that properly there is no voice in this world which is completely human to me, which fully understands all I say and with clear sympathy and sense answers to me, but your voice only. That is a curious fact, and not quite a joyful one to me. The solitude, the silence of my poor soul, in the centre of this roaring whirlpool called Universe, is great, always, and sometimes strange and almost awful. I have two million talking bipeds without feathers, close at my elbow, too; and of these it is often hard for me to say whether the so-called "wise" or the almost professedly foolish are the more inexpressibly unproductive to me. "Silence, Silence!" I often say to myself: "Be silent, thou poor fool; and prepare for that Divine Silence which is now not far!"—On the whole, write to me whenever you can; and be not weary of well-doing.
I have had sad things to do and see since I wrote to you: the loss of my dear and good old Mother, which could not be spared me forever, has come more like a kind of total bankruptcy upon me than might have been expected, considering her age and mine. Oh those last two days, that last Christmas Sunday! She was a true, pious, brave, and noble Mother to me; and it is now all over; and the Past has all become pale and sad and sacred;—and the all-devouring potency of Death, what we call Death, has never looked so strange, cruel and unspeakable to me. Nay notcruelaltogether, let me say: huge, profound,unspeakable,that is the word.—You too have lost your good old Mother, who stayed with you like mine, clear to the last: alas, alas, it is the oldest Law of Nature; and it comes on every one of us with a strange originality, as if it had never happened before.— Forward, however; and no more lamenting; no more than cannot be helped. "Paradise is under the shadow of our swords," said the Emir: "Forward!"—
I make no way in my Prussian History; I bore and dig toilsomely through the unutterablest mass of dead rubbish, which is not even English, which is German and inhuman; and hardly from ten tons of learned inanity is there to be riddled one old rusty nail. For I have been back as far as Pytheas who, first of speaking creatures, beheld the Teutonic Countries; and have questioned all manner of extinct German shadows,—who answer nothing but mumblings. And on the whole Fritz himself is not sufficiently divine to me, far from it; and I am getting old, and heavy of heart;—and in short, it oftenest seems to me I shall never write any word about that matter; and have again fairly got into the element of the IMPOSSIBLE. Very well: could I help it? I can at least be honestly silent; and "bear my indigence with dignity," as you once said. The insuperable difficulty ofFredericis, that he, the genuine little ray of Veritable and Eternal that was in him, lay imbedded in the putrid Eighteenth Century, such an Ocean of sordid nothingness, shams, and scandalous hypocrisies, as never weltered in the world before; and that in everything I can find yet written or recorded of him, he still, to all intents and purposes, most tragicallyliesTHERE;—and ought not to lie there, if any use is ever to be had of him, or at least ofwritingabout him; for as to him, he with his work is safe enough to us, far elsewhere.—Pity me, pity me; I know not on what hand to turn; and have such a Chaos filling all my Earth and Heaven as was seldom seen in British or Foreign Literature! Add to which, the Sacred Entity, Literature itself, is not growing more venerable to me, but less and ever less: good Heavens, I feel often as if there were no madder set of bladders tumbling on the billows of the general Bedlam at this moment than even the Literary ones,—dear at twopence a gross, I should say, unless one couldannihilatethem by purchase on those easy terms! But do not tell this in Gath; let it be a sad family secret.
I smile, with a kind of grave joy, over your American speculations, and wild dashing portraitures of things as they are with you; and recognize well, under your light caricature, the outlines of a right true picture, which has often made me sad and grim in late years. Yes, I consider that the "Battle of Freedom and Slavery" is very far from ended; and that the fate of poor "Freedom" in the quarrel is very questionable indeed! Alas, there is but oneSlavery,as I wrote somewhere; and that, I think, is mounting towards a height, which may bring strokes to bear upon it again! Meanwhile, patience; for us there is nothing else appointed.—Tell me, however, what has become of your Book on England? We shall really be obliged to you for that. A piece of it went through all the Newspapers, some years ago; which was really unique for its quaint kindly insight, humor, and other qualities; like an etching by Hollar or Durer, amid the continents of vile smearing which are called "pictures" at present. Come on, Come on; give us the Book, and don't loiter!—
Miss Bacon has fled away toSt. Alban's(theGreatBacon's place) five or six months ago; and is there working out her Shakespeare Problem, from the depths of her own mind, disdainful apparently, or desperate and careless, of allevidencefrom Museums or Archives; I have not had an answer from her since before Christmas, and have now lost her address. Poor Lady: I sometimes silently wish she were safe home again; for truly there can no madder enterprise than her present one be well figured. Adieu, my Friend; I must stop short here. Write soon, if you have any charity. Good be with you ever.
—T. Carlyle
CLVI. Emerson to Carlyle
Concord, 17 April, 1855
My Dear Friend,—On this delicious spring day, I will obey the beautiful voices of the winds, long disobeyed, and address you; nor cloud the hour by looking at the letters in my drawer to know if a twelvemonth has been allowed to elapse since this tardy writing was due. Mr. Everett sent me one day a letter he had received from you, containing a kind message to me, which gave me pleasure and pain. I returned the letter with thanks, and with promises I would sin no more. Instantly, I was whisked, by "the stormy wing of Fate," out of my chain, and whirled, like a dry leaf, through the State of New York.
Now at home again, I read English Newspapers, with all the world, and claim an imaginary privilege over my compatriots, that I revolve therein my friend's large part. Ward said to me yesterday, that Carlyle's star was daily rising. For C. had said years ago, when all men thought him mad, that which the rest of mortals, including the Times Newspaper, have at last got near enough to see with eyes, and therefore to believe. And one day, in Philadelphia, you should have heard the wise young Philip Randolph defend you against objections of mine. But when I have such testimony, I say to myself, the high-seeing austerely exigent friend whom I elected, and who elected me, twenty years and more ago, finds me heavy and silent, when all the world elects and loves him. Yet I have not changed. I have the same pride in his genius, the same sympathy with the Genius that governs his, the old love with the old limitations, though love and limitation be all untold. And I see well what a piece of Providence he is, how material he is to the times, which must always have a solo Soprano to balance the roar of the Orchestra. The solo sings the theme; the orchestra roars antagonistically but follows.—And have I not put him into my Chapter of "English Spiritual Tendencies," with all thankfulness to the Eternal Creator,—though the chapter lie unborn in a trunk?
'T is fine for us to excuse ourselves, and patch with promises. We shall do as before, and science is a fatalist. I follow, I find, the fortunes of my Country, in my privatest ways. An American is pioneer and man of all work, and reads up his newspaper on Saturday night, as farmers and foresters do. We admire the [Greek], and mean to give our boys the grand habit; but we only sketch what they may do. No leisure except for the strong, the nimble have none.—I ought to tell you what I do, or I ought to have to tell you what I have done. But what can I? the same concession to the levity of the times, the noise of America comes again. I have even run on wrong topics for my parsimonious Muse, and waste my time from my true studies. England I see as a roaring volcano of Fate, which threatens to roast or smother the poor literary Plinys that come too near for mere purpose of reporting.
I have even fancied you did me a harm by the valued gift of Antony Wood;—which, and the like of which, I take a lotophagous pleasure in eating. Yet this is measuring after appearance, measuring on hours and days; the true measure is quite other, for life takes its color and quality not from the days, but the dawns. The lucid intervals are like drowning men's moments, equivalent to the foregoing years. Besides, Nature uses us. We live but little for ourselves, a good deal for our children, and strangers. Each man is one more lump of clay to hold the world together. It is in the power of the Spirit meantime to make him rich reprisals,—which he confides will somewhere be done.—Ah, my friend, you have better things to send me word of, than these musings of indolence. Is Frederic recreated? Is Frederic the Great?
Forget my short-comings and write to me. Miss Bacon sends me word, again and again, of your goodness. Against hope and sight she must be making a remarkable book. I have a letter from her, a few days ago, written in perfect assurance of success! Kindest remembrances to your wife and to your brother.
Yours faithfully,R.W. Emerson
CLVII. Carlyle to Emerson
Chelsea, 18 May, 1855
Dear Emerson,—Last Sunday, Clough was here; and we were speaking about you, (much to your discredit, you need not doubt,) and how stingy in the way of Letters you were grown; when, next morning, your Letter itself made its appearance. Thanks, thanks. You know not in the least, I perceive, nor can be made to understand at all, how indispensable your Letters are to me. How you are, and have for a long time been, the one of all the sons of Adam who, I felt, completely understood what I was saying; and answered with a trulyhumanvoice,—inexpressibly consolatory to a poor man, in his lonesome pilgrimage, towards the evening of the day! So many voices are not human; but more or less bovine, porcine, canine; and one's soul dies away in sorrow in the sound of them, and is reduced to a dialogue with the "Silences," which is of a very abstruse nature!—Well, whether you write to me or not, I reserve to myself the privilege of writing to you, so long as we both continue in this world! As the beneficent Presences vanish from me, one after the other, those that remain are the more precious, and I will not part with them, not with the chief of them, beyond all.
This last year has been a grimmer lonelier one with me than any I can recollect for a long time. I did not go to the Country at all in summer or winter; refused even my Christmas at The Grange with the Ashburtons,—it was too sad an anniversary for me;—I have sat here in my garret, wriggling and wrestling on the worst terms with a Task that I cannot do, that generally seems to me not worth doing, and yetmustbedone.These are truly the terms. I never had such a business in my life before. Frederick himself is a pretty little man to me, veracious, courageous, invincible in his small sphere; but he does not rise into the empyrean regions, or kindle my heart round him at all; and his history, upon which there are wagon-loads of dull bad books, is the most dislocated, unmanageably incoherent, altogether dusty, barren and beggarly production of the modern Muses as given hitherto. No man ofgeniusever saw him with eyes, except twice Mirabeau, for half an hour each time. And the wretched Books have noindexes,no precision of detail; and I am far away from Berlin and the seat of information;—and, in brief, shall be beaten miserably with this unwise enterprise in my old days;and(in fine) will consent to be so, and get through it if I can before I die. This of obstinacy is the one quality I still show; all my other qualities (hope, among them) often seem to have pretty much taken leave of me; but it is necessary to hold by this last. Pray for me; I will complain no more at present. General Washington gained the freedom of America— chiefly by this respectable quality I talk of; nor can a history of Frederick be written, in Chelsea in the year 1855, except asagainsthope, and by planting yourself upon it in an extremely dogged manner.
We are all wool-gathering here, with wide eyes and astonished minds, at a singular rate, since you heard last from me! "Balaklava," I can perceive, is likely to be a substantive in the English language henceforth: it in truth expresses compendiously what an earnest mind will experience everywhere in English life; if his soul rise at all above cotton and scrip, a man has to pronounce it all aBalaklavathese many years. A Balaklava nowyielding,under the pressure of rains and unexpected transit of heavy wagons; champing itself down into mere mud-gulfs,—towards the bottomless Pool, if some flooring be not found. To me it is not intrinsically a new phenomenon, only an extremely hideous one.Altum Silentium,what else can I reply to it at present? The Turk War, undertaken under pressure of the mere mobility, seemed to me an enterprise worthy of Bedlam from the first; and this method of carrying it on,withoutany general, or with a mere sash and cocked-hat for one, is of the same block of stuff.Ach Gott!Is not Anarchy, and parliamentary eloquence instead of work, continued for half a century everywhere, a beautiful piece of business? We are in alliance with Louis Napoleon (a gentleman who has shown onlyhousebreakerqualities hitherto, and is required now to show heroic ones,orgo to the Devil); and under Marechal Saint-Arnaud (who was once a dancing-master in this city, and continued athiefin all cities), a Commander of the Playactor-Pirate description, resembling aGeneralas Alexander Dumas does Dante Alighieri,—we have got into a very strange problem indeed!—But there is something almost grand in the stubborn thickside patience and persistence of this English People; and I do not question but they will work themselves through in one fashion or another; nay probably, get a great deal of benefit out of this astonishing slap on the nose to their self-complacency before all the world. They have notdoneyet, I calculate, by any manner of means: they are, however, admonished in an ignominious and convincing manner, amid the laughter of nations, that they are altogether on the wrong road this great while (two hundred years, as I have been calculating often),—and I shudder to think of the plunging and struggle they will have to get into the approximately right one again. Pray for them also, poor stupid overfed heavy-laden souls!—Before my paper quite end, I must in my own name, and that of a select company of others, inquire rigorously of R.W.E. why he does notgiveus that little Book on England he has promised so long? I am very serious in saying, I myself want much to see it;—and that I can see no reason why we all should not, without delay. Bring it out, I say, and print it,tale quale.You will never get it in the least like whatyouwish it, clearly no! But I venture to warrant, it is good enough,—far too good for the readers that are to get it. Such a pack of blockheads, and disloyal and bewildered unfortunates who know not their right hand from their left, as fill me with astonishment, and are more and more forfeiting all respect from me. Publish the Book, I say; let us have it and so have done! Adieu, my dear friend, for this time. I had a thousand things more to write, but have wasted my sheet, and must end. I will take another before long, whatever you do. In my lonely thoughts you are never long absent:Valeteall of you at Concord!
—T. Carlyle
CLVIII. Emerson to Carlyle