My letter will find you, I suppose, meditating new lectures for your London disciples.  May love and truth inspire them!  I can see easily that my predictions are coming to pass, and that. having waited until your Fame wag in the floodtide, we shall not now see you at all on western shores.  Our saintly Dr. T—–­, I am told, had a letter within a year from Lord Byron’s daughter, informing the good man of the appearance of a certain wonderful genius in London named Thomas Carlyle, and all his astonishing workings on her own and her friends’ brains, and him the very monster whom the Doctor had been honoring with his best dread and consternation these five years.  But do come in one of Mr. Cunard’s ships as soon as the booksellers have made you rich.  If they fail to do so, come and read lectures which the Yankees will pay for.  Give my love and hope and perpetual remembrance to your wife, and my wife’s also, who bears her in her kindest heart, and who resolves every now and then to write to her, that she may thank her for the beautiful Guido.

You told me to send you no more accounts.  But I certainly shall, as our financial relations are grown more complex, and I wish at least to relieve myself of this unwonted burden of booksellers’ accounts and long delays, by sharing them.  I have had one of their estimates by me a year, waiting to send.  Farewell.

—­R.W.E.

LII.  Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 1 April, 1840

My Dear Emerson,—­A Letter has been due to you from me, if not by palpable law of reciprocity, yet by other law and right, for some week or two.  I meant to write, so soon as Fraser and I had got a settlement effected.  The traveling Sumner being about to return into your neighborhood, I gladly accept his offer to take a message to you.  I wish I had anything beyond a dull Letter to send!  But unless, as my Wife suggests, I go and get you a D’Orsay Portrait of myself, I see not what there is!  Do you read German or not?  I now and then fall in with a curious German volume, not perhaps so easily accessible in the Western world.  Tell me.  Or do you ever mean to learn it?  I decidedly wish you would.—­As to the D’Orsay Portrait, it is a real curiosity:  Count D’Orsay the emperor of European Dandies portraying the Prophet of spiritual Sansculottism!  He came rolling down hither one day, many months ago, in his sun-chariot, to the bedazzlement of all bystanders; found me in dusty gray-plaid dressing-gown, grim as the spirit of Presbyterianism (my Wife said), and contrived to get along well enough with me.  I found him a man worth talking to, once and away; a man of decided natural gifts; every utterance of his containing in it a wild caricature likeness of some object or other; a dashing man, who might, some twenty years sooner born, have become one of Bonaparte’s Marshals, and is, alas,—­Count D’Orsay!  The Portrait he dashed off in some twenty minutes (I was dining there, to meet Landor); we have not chanced to meet together since, and I refuse to undergo any more eight-o’clock dinners for such an object.—­Now if I do not send you the Portrait, after all?