The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II | Page 6

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