Miss Martineau’s Book on America is out, here and with you.  I have read it for the good Authoress’s sake, whom I love much.  She is one of the strangest phenomena to me.  A genuine little Poetess, buckramed, swathed like a mummy into Socinian and Political-Economy formulas; and yet verily alive in the inside of that!  “God has given a Prophet to every People in its own speech,” say the Arabs.  Even the English Unitarians were one day to have their Poet, and the best that could be said for them too was to be said.  I admire this good lady’s integrity, sincerity; her quick, sharp discernment to the depth it goes:  her love also is great; nay, in fact it is too great:  the host of illustrious obscure mortals whom she produces on you, of Preachers, Pamphleteers, Antislavers, Able Editors, and other Atlases bearing (unknown to us) the world on their shoulder, is absolutely more than enough.  What they say to her Book here I do not well know.  I fancy the general reception will be good, and even brilliant.  I saw Mrs. Butler* last night, “in an ocean of blonde and broadcloth,” one of those oceans common at present.  Ach Gott!  They are not of Persons, these soirdes, but of Cloth Figures.

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* Mrs Fanny Kemble Butler.
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I mean to retreat into Scotland very soon, to repose myself as I intended.  My Wife continues here with her Mother; here at least till the weather grow too hot, or a journey to join me seem otherwise advisable for her.  She is gathering strength, but continues still weak enough.  I rest myself “on the sunny side of hedges” in native Annandale, one of the obscurest regions; no man shall speak to me, I will speak to no man; but have dialogues yonder with the old dumb crags, of the most unfathomable sort.  Once rested, I think of returning to London for another season.  Several things are beginning which I ought to see end before taking up my staff again.  In this enormous Chaos the very multitude of conflicting perversions produces something more like a calm than you can elsewhere meet with.  Men let you alone, which is an immense thing:  they do it even because they have no time to meddle with you.  London, or else the Backwoods of America, or Craigenputtock!  We shall see.

I still beg the comfort of hearing from you.  I am sick of soul and body, but not incurable; the loving word of a Waldo Emerson is as balm to me, medicinal now more than ever.  My Wife earnestly joins me in love to the Concord Household.  May a blessing be in it, on one and all!  I do nowise give up the idea of sojourning there one time yet.  On the contrary, it seems almost certain that I shall.  Good be with you.

Yours always,
            T. Carlyle*

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* Emerson wrote in his Diary, July 27, 1837:   “A letter today
from Carlyle rejoiced me.   Pleasant would life be with such
companions.   But if you cannot have them on good mutual terms you
cannot have them.   If not the Deity but our wilfulness hews and
shapes the new relations, their sweetness escapes, as
strawberries lose their flavor by cultivation.”
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XVII.  Emerson to Carlyle