Yours ever,
       T. Carlyle

XLVII.  Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 8 December, 1839

My Dear Emerson,—­What a time since we have written to one another! was it you that defalcated?  Alas, I fear it was myself; I have had a feeling these nine or ten weeks that you were expecting to hear from me; that I absolutely could not write.  Your kind gift of Fuller’s Eckermann* was handed in to our Hackney coach, in Regent Street, as we wended homewards from the railway and Scotland, on perhaps the 8th of September last; a welcome memorial of distant friends and doings:  nay, perhaps there was a Letter two weeks prior to that:—­I am a great sinner!  But the truth is, I could not write; and now I can and do it!

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* “Conversations with Goethe.   Translated from the German of
Eckermann.   By S.M.  Fuller.”   Boston, 1839.   This was the fourth
volume in the series of “Specimens of Foreign Standard
Literature,” edited by George Ripley.   The book has a
characteristic Preface by Miss Fuller, in which she speaks of
Carlyle as “the only competent English critic” of Goethe.
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Our sojourn in Scotland was stagnant, sad; but tranquil, well let alone,—­an indispensable blessing to a poor creature fretted to fiddle-strings, as I grow to be in this Babylon, take it as I will.  We had eight weeks of desolate rain; with about eight days bright as diamonds intercalated in that black monotony of bad weather.  The old Hills are the same; the old Streams go gushing along as in past years, in past ages; but he that looks on them is no longer the same:  and the old Friends, where are they?  I walk silent through my old haunts in that country; sunk usually in inexpressible reflections, in an immeasurable chaos of musings and mopings that cannot be reflected or articulated.  The only work I had on hand was one that would not prosper with me:  an Article for the Quarterly Review on the state of the Working Classes here.  The thoughts were familiar to me, old, many years old; but the utterance of them, in what spoken dialect to utter them!  The Quarterly Review was not an eligible vehicle, and yet the eligiblest; of Whigs, abandoned to Dilettantism and withered sceptical conventionality, there was no hope at all; the London-and-Westminster Radicals, wedded to their Benthamee Formulas, and tremulous at their own shadows, expressly rejected my proposal many months ago:  Tories alone remained; Tories I often think have more stuff in them, in spite of their blindness, than any other class we have;—­Walter Scott’s sympathy with his fellow creatures, what is it compared with Sydney Smith’s, with a Poor Law Commissioner’s!  Well:  this thing would not prosper with me in Scotland at all; nor here at all, where nevertheless I had to persist writing; writing and burning, and cursing my destiny, and then again writing.