Add to which, the Sacred Entity, Literature itself,
is not growing more venerable to me, but less and
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 could annihilate
them by purchase on those easy terms!
is not growing more venerable to me, but less and
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 could annihilate
them by purchase on those easy terms!
Thomas Carlyle
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? 262 Carlyle to Emerson.
-\. \__\
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 enormous appetite withal, and very uncertain
and chaotic in all points except his outer breeding,
which is fixed enough, and perfect according to the
modern English style. I rather dread explosions
in his history. A big, fierce, weeping, hungry man;
not a strong one. Ag 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 impossi-
bility, 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.
'-' "--\/*. . |"7Jl? "Ym
. . , ' I-
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? Emerson to Carlyle. 263
GLIV.
EMERSON T0 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,
1
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 prom-
ises to come and see me, and has begun most pro-
pitiously in New York. For you, -- I have too much
constitutional regard and i, 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.
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? 264 Emerson to Carlyle.
And yet I should have been pushed to write
without Samuel Laurence ; for I lately looked into
Jesuitism, 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 with-
'out witness, though without this single voice per-
haps 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 feuilleton-
ists 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 your-
self. We must let Arctic Navigators and deep-
sea 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
tax with satire, and with not being warm enough --
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? Emerson to Carlyle. 265
for this poor world ;--I too, -- though I know its
meltings to-me-ward. Then I learned that the news-
papers 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 let-
ter,--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
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? 266 Emerson to Carlyle.
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 Wis-
consin. 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 the New York Tribune is the right
spiritual father of all this region; he prints and
disperses one hundred and ten thousand newspa-
pers 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,"
-~
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? Emerson to Carlyle. 267
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 interest-
ing, for from wealth power refuses to be divorced,
is on a new scale. Californian quartz mountains
dumped down in New York to be repiled archi-
tecturally along shore from Canada to Cuba, and
thence west to California again. John Bull inter-
ests 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
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? 268 Carlyle lo Emerson.
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. Emnnson.
CLV.
CARLYLE TO EMERSON.
Cnnnsna, 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 con-
tinue 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
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? Carlyle to Emerson. 269
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 roar-
ing 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 un-
productive to me. " Silence, Silence ! " I often say
to myself: " Be silent, thou poor fool; and pre-
pare 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
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? 270 Carlyle l0 Emerson.
call Death, has never looked so strange, cruel and
unspeakable to me. Nay not cruel altogether, 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 original-
ity, 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 Teu-
tonic 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:
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? Carlyle to 1/hnersrm. 2 7 1
could I help it? I can at least be honestly silent;
and " bear my indigence with dignity," as you once
said. The insuperable difficulty of Frederic is,
that he, the genuine little ray of Veritable and
Eternal that was in him, lay imbedded in the pu-
trid 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
tragically lies THERE ;-- and ought not to lie there,
if any use is ever to be had of him, or at least of
writing about 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
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 could annihilate
them by purchase on those easy terms! But do
not tell this in Gath; let it be a sad family-
secret.
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? 272 Carlyle to Emerson.
I smile, with a kind of grave joy, over your
American speculations, and wild dashing portrait-
ures 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 one Slavery, 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 in-
sight, humor, and other qualities ;_ like an etching
by Hollar or Diirer, 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 to St. Alban's (the
Great Bacon's place) five or six months ago ; and is
there working out her Shakespeare Problem, from
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? Emerson to Carlyle. 27 3
the depths of her own mind, disdainful apparently,
or desperate and careless, of all evidence from
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. -i 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,--0n 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
vor. . II 18
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? 274 Emerson to Carlyle.
--\_\_ \
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 privi-
lege 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 objec-
tions 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
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? Emerson to Carlyle. 275
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 orches-
tra 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. c We shall do as before, and sci-
ence 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 for-
esters do. We admire the [L? 'Ya7\. 0'\lI'UxL'a, 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 conces-
sion 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
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? 276 Emerson to Carlyle.
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.
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? Carlyle to Emerson. 277
CLVII.
CARLYLE TO EMERSON.
CHELSEA, 13 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 truly
human voice,--inexpressibly consolatory to a poor
man, in his lonesome pilgrimage, towards the even-
ing 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
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? 278 Carlyle to Emerson.
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. l
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 anniver-
sary for me; -- I have sat here in my garret, wrig-
gling and wrestling on the worst terms with a Task
that I cannot do, that generally seems to me not
worth doing, and yet must be done. 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 empy-
rean regions, or kindle my heart round him at all;
and his history, upon which there are wagon-loads
of dull bad books, is the f"'1oS'! 3 dislocated, unman-
ageably incoherent, altogether dusty, barren and
beggarly production of the modern Muses as given
hitherto. N o man of genius ever saw him with eyes,
except twice Mirabeau, for half an hour each time.
And the wretched Books have no indexes, no pre-
cision of detail ; and I am far away from Berlin and
the seat of information ;--and, in brief, shall be
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? Carlyle to Emerson. 279
. "_
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 obsti-
nacy 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 neces-
sary to hold by this last. Pray for me; I will
complain no more at present. General Washing-
ton 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 as against hope, 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 lan-
guage henceforth: it in truth expresses compen-
diously 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 a Balaklava these many years. A Balaklava
now yielding, under the pressure of rains and un-
expected transit of heavy wagons; champing itself
down into mere mud-gulfs,--towards the bottom-
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? 28Q Uarlg/le to Emerson.
less Pool, if some flooring be not found. To me it
is not intrinsically a new phenomenon, only an ex-
tremely hideous one. Altum Silentium, what else
can I reply to it at present? The Turk War, under-
taken under pressure of the mere mobility, seemed
to me an enterprise worthy of Bedlam from the first ;
and this method of carrying it on, without any gen-
eral, or with a mere sash and cocked-hat for one, is
of the same block of stufi. Ach Gott! Is not An-
archy, and parliamentary eloquence instead of work,
continued for half a century everywhere, a beauti-
ful piece of business? We are in alliance with
Louis Napoleon (a gentleman who has shown only
housebreaker qualities hitherto, and is required now
to show heroic ones, or go to the Devil) ; and under
Mare? chal Saint-Arnaud (who was once a dan-
cing-master in this city, and continued a thief in
all cities), a Commander of the Playactor-Pirate
description, resembling a General as 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 proba-
bly get a great deal of benefit out of this aston-
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? Carlyle to Emerson. 281
ishing slap on the nose to their self-complacency
before all the world. They have not done yet, I
calculate, by any manner ofmeans: they are, how-
ever, 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 approxi-
mately 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 not
give us that little Book on England he has prom-
ised so long?
? 262 Carlyle to Emerson.
-\. \__\
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 enormous appetite withal, and very uncertain
and chaotic in all points except his outer breeding,
which is fixed enough, and perfect according to the
modern English style. I rather dread explosions
in his history. A big, fierce, weeping, hungry man;
not a strong one. Ag 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 impossi-
bility, 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.
'-' "--\/*. . |"7Jl? "Ym
. . , ' I-
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? Emerson to Carlyle. 263
GLIV.
EMERSON T0 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,
1
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 prom-
ises to come and see me, and has begun most pro-
pitiously in New York. For you, -- I have too much
constitutional regard and i, 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.
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? 264 Emerson to Carlyle.
And yet I should have been pushed to write
without Samuel Laurence ; for I lately looked into
Jesuitism, 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 with-
'out witness, though without this single voice per-
haps 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 feuilleton-
ists 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 your-
self. We must let Arctic Navigators and deep-
sea 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
tax with satire, and with not being warm enough --
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? Emerson to Carlyle. 265
for this poor world ;--I too, -- though I know its
meltings to-me-ward. Then I learned that the news-
papers 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 let-
ter,--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
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? 266 Emerson to Carlyle.
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 Wis-
consin. 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 the New York Tribune is the right
spiritual father of all this region; he prints and
disperses one hundred and ten thousand newspa-
pers 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,"
-~
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? Emerson to Carlyle. 267
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 interest-
ing, for from wealth power refuses to be divorced,
is on a new scale. Californian quartz mountains
dumped down in New York to be repiled archi-
tecturally along shore from Canada to Cuba, and
thence west to California again. John Bull inter-
ests 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
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? 268 Carlyle lo Emerson.
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. Emnnson.
CLV.
CARLYLE TO EMERSON.
Cnnnsna, 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 con-
tinue 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
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? Carlyle to Emerson. 269
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 roar-
ing 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 un-
productive to me. " Silence, Silence ! " I often say
to myself: " Be silent, thou poor fool; and pre-
pare 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
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? 270 Carlyle l0 Emerson.
call Death, has never looked so strange, cruel and
unspeakable to me. Nay not cruel altogether, 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 original-
ity, 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 Teu-
tonic 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:
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? Carlyle to 1/hnersrm. 2 7 1
could I help it? I can at least be honestly silent;
and " bear my indigence with dignity," as you once
said. The insuperable difficulty of Frederic is,
that he, the genuine little ray of Veritable and
Eternal that was in him, lay imbedded in the pu-
trid 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
tragically lies THERE ;-- and ought not to lie there,
if any use is ever to be had of him, or at least of
writing about 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
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 could annihilate
them by purchase on those easy terms! But do
not tell this in Gath; let it be a sad family-
secret.
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? 272 Carlyle to Emerson.
I smile, with a kind of grave joy, over your
American speculations, and wild dashing portrait-
ures 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 one Slavery, 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 in-
sight, humor, and other qualities ;_ like an etching
by Hollar or Diirer, 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 to St. Alban's (the
Great Bacon's place) five or six months ago ; and is
there working out her Shakespeare Problem, from
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? Emerson to Carlyle. 27 3
the depths of her own mind, disdainful apparently,
or desperate and careless, of all evidence from
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. -i 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,--0n 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
vor. . II 18
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? 274 Emerson to Carlyle.
--\_\_ \
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 privi-
lege 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 objec-
tions 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
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? Emerson to Carlyle. 275
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 orches-
tra 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. c We shall do as before, and sci-
ence 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 for-
esters do. We admire the [L? 'Ya7\. 0'\lI'UxL'a, 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 conces-
sion 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
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? 276 Emerson to Carlyle.
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.
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? Carlyle to Emerson. 277
CLVII.
CARLYLE TO EMERSON.
CHELSEA, 13 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 truly
human voice,--inexpressibly consolatory to a poor
man, in his lonesome pilgrimage, towards the even-
ing 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
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? 278 Carlyle to Emerson.
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. l
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 anniver-
sary for me; -- I have sat here in my garret, wrig-
gling and wrestling on the worst terms with a Task
that I cannot do, that generally seems to me not
worth doing, and yet must be done. 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 empy-
rean regions, or kindle my heart round him at all;
and his history, upon which there are wagon-loads
of dull bad books, is the f"'1oS'! 3 dislocated, unman-
ageably incoherent, altogether dusty, barren and
beggarly production of the modern Muses as given
hitherto. N o man of genius ever saw him with eyes,
except twice Mirabeau, for half an hour each time.
And the wretched Books have no indexes, no pre-
cision of detail ; and I am far away from Berlin and
the seat of information ;--and, in brief, shall be
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? Carlyle to Emerson. 279
. "_
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 obsti-
nacy 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 neces-
sary to hold by this last. Pray for me; I will
complain no more at present. General Washing-
ton 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 as against hope, 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 lan-
guage henceforth: it in truth expresses compen-
diously 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 a Balaklava these many years. A Balaklava
now yielding, under the pressure of rains and un-
expected transit of heavy wagons; champing itself
down into mere mud-gulfs,--towards the bottom-
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-11-14 09:13 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/pst. 000028736530 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? 28Q Uarlg/le to Emerson.
less Pool, if some flooring be not found. To me it
is not intrinsically a new phenomenon, only an ex-
tremely hideous one. Altum Silentium, what else
can I reply to it at present? The Turk War, under-
taken under pressure of the mere mobility, seemed
to me an enterprise worthy of Bedlam from the first ;
and this method of carrying it on, without any gen-
eral, or with a mere sash and cocked-hat for one, is
of the same block of stufi. Ach Gott! Is not An-
archy, and parliamentary eloquence instead of work,
continued for half a century everywhere, a beauti-
ful piece of business? We are in alliance with
Louis Napoleon (a gentleman who has shown only
housebreaker qualities hitherto, and is required now
to show heroic ones, or go to the Devil) ; and under
Mare? chal Saint-Arnaud (who was once a dan-
cing-master in this city, and continued a thief in
all cities), a Commander of the Playactor-Pirate
description, resembling a General as 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 proba-
bly get a great deal of benefit out of this aston-
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-11-14 09:13 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/pst. 000028736530 Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
? Carlyle to Emerson. 281
ishing slap on the nose to their self-complacency
before all the world. They have not done yet, I
calculate, by any manner ofmeans: they are, how-
ever, 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 approxi-
mately 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 not
give us that little Book on England he has prom-
ised so long?
