innocent, simple-hearted man, of much natural intelligence and goodness, with an air of rusticity, veracity, and dignity withal, which in many ways appeals to one. The good Alcott: with his long, lean face and figure, with his gray worn temples and mild radiant eyes; all bent on saving the world by a return to acorns and the golden age; he comes before one like a kind of venerable Don Quixote, whom nobody can even laugh at without loving!….

My poor Wife is still weak, overshadowed with sorrow: her loss is great, the loss almost as of the widow's mite; for except her good Mother she had almost no kindred left; and as for friends— they are not rife in this world.—God be thanked withal they are not entirely non-extant! Have I not a Friend, and Friends, though they too are in sorrow? Good be with you all.

—T. Carlyle.

By far the valuablest thing that Alcott brought me was the Newspaper report of Emerson's last Lectures in New York. Really a right wholesome thing; radiant, fresh as the morning; a thing worth reading; which accordingly I clipped from the Newspaper, and have in a state of assiduous circulation to the comfort of many.—I cannot bid you quit the Dial, though it, too, alas, is Antinomian somewhat! Perge, perge, nevertheless. —And so now an end.

—T. C.

LXXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 29 August, 1842

My Dear. Emerson,—This, morning your new Letter, of the 15th August, has arrived;* exactly one fortnight old: thanks to the gods and steam-demons! I already, perhaps six weeks ago, answered your former Letter,—acknowledging the manna-gift of the L51, and other things; nor do I think the Letter can have been lost, for I remember putting it into the Post-Office myself. Today I am on the eve of an expedition into Suffolk, and full of petty business: however, I will throw you one word, were it only to lighten my own heart a little. You are a kind friend to me, and a precious;—and when I mourn over the impotence of Human Speech, and how each of us, speak or write as he will, has to stand dumb, cased up in his own unutterabilities, before his unutterable Brother, I feel always as if Emerson were the man I could soonest try to speak with,—were I within reach of him! Well; we must be content. A pen is a pen, and worth something; though it expresses about as much of a man's meaning perhaps as the stamping of a hoof will express of a horse's meaning; a very poor expression indeed!

————- * This letter of 15th August is missing. ————-

Your bibliopolic advice about Cromwell or my next Book shall be carefully attended, if I live ever to write another Book! But I have again got down into primeval Night; and live alone and mute with the Manes, as you say; uncertain whether I shall ever more see day. I am partly ashamed of myself; but cannot help it. One of my grand difficulties I suspect to be that I cannot write two Books at once; cannot be in the seventeenth century and in the nineteenth at one and the same moment; a feat which excels even that of the Irishman's bird: "Nobody but a bird can be in two places at once!" For my heart is sick and sore in behalf of my own poor generation; nay, I feel withal as if the one hope of help for it consisted in the possibility of new Cromwells and new Puritans: thus do the two centuries stand related to me, the seventeenth worthless except precisely in so far as it can be made the nineteenth; and yet let anybody try that enterprise! Heaven help me.—I believe at least that I ought to hold my tongue; more especially at present.

Thanks for asking me to write you a word in the Dial. Had such a purpose struck me long ago, there have been many things passing through my head,—march-marching as they ever do, in long drawn, scandalous Falstaff-regiments (a man ashamed to be seen passing through Coventry with such a set!)—some one of which, snatched out of the ragged rank, and dressed and drilled a little, might perhaps fitly have been saved from Chaos, and sent to the Dial. In future we shall be on the outlook. I love your Dial, and yet it is with a kind of shudder. You seem to me in danger of dividing yourselves from the Fact of this present Universe, in which alone, ugly as it is, can I find any anchorage, and soaring away after Ideas, Beliefs, Revelations, and such like,—into perilous altitudes, as I think; beyond the curve of perpetual frost, for one thing! I know not how to utter what impression you give me; take the above as some stamping of the fore-hoof. Surely I could wish you returned into your own poor nineteenth century, its follies and maladies, its blind or half-blind, but gigantic toilings, its laughter and its tears, and trying to evolve in some measure the hidden Godlike that lies in it;—that seems to me the kind of feat for literary men. Alas, it is so easy to screw one's self up into high and ever higher altitudes of Transcendentalism, and see nothing under one but the everlasting snows of Himmalayah, the Earth shrinking to a Planet, and the indigo firmament sowing itself with daylight stars; easy for you, for me: but whither does it lead? I dread always, To inanity and mere injuring of the lungs!—"Stamp, Stamp, Stamp!"— Well, I do believe, for one thing, a man has no right to say to his own generation, turning quite away from it, "Be damned!" It is the whole Past and the whole Future, this same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very wretched generation of ours. Come back into it, I tell you;—and so for the present will "stamp" no more….

Adieu, my friend; I must not add a word more. My Wife is out on a visit; it is to bring her back that I am now setting forth for Suffolk. I hope to see Ely too, and St. Ives, and Huntingdon, and various Cromwelliana. My blessings on the Concord Household now and always. Commend me expressly to your Wife and your Mother. Farewell, dear friend.

—T. Carlyle

LXXIX. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 15 October, 1842

My Dear Carlyle,—I am in your debt for at least two letters since I sent you any word. I should be well content to receive one of these stringent epistles of bark and steel and mellow wine with every day's post, but as there is no hope that more will be sent without my writing to signify that these have come, I hereby certify that I love you well and prize all your messages. I read with special interest what you say of these English studies, and I doubt not the Book is in steady progress again. We shall see what change the changed position of the author will make in the book. The first History expected its public; the second is written to an expecting people. The tone of the first was proud,—to defiance; we will see if applauses have mitigated the master's temper. This time he has a hero, and we shall have a sort of standard to try, by the hero who fights, the hero who writes. Well; may grand and friendly spirits assist the work in all hours; may impulses and presences from that profound world which makes and embraces the whole of humanity, keep your feet on the Mount of Vision which commands the Centuries, and the book shall be an indispensable Benefit to men, which is the surest fame. Let me know all that can be told of your progress in it. You shall see in the last Dial a certain shadow or mask of yours, "another Richmond," who has read your lectures and profited thereby.* Alcott sent me the paper from London, but I do not know the name of the writer.

As for