I find I had never seen before.  The old Cities too are a little beautiful to me, in spite of my state of nerves; honest, kindly people too, but sadly short of our and your despatch-of-business talents,—­a really painful defect in the long run.  I was on two of Fritz’s Battle-fields, moreover:  Lobositz in Bohemia, and Kunersdorf by Frankfurt on the Oder; but did not, especially in the latter case, make much of that.  Schiller’s death-chamber, Goethe’s sad Court-environment; above all, Luther’s little room in the Wartburg (I believe I actually had tears in my eyes there, and kissed the old oak-table, being in a very flurried state of nerves), my belief was that under the Canopy there was not at present so holy a spot as that same.  Of human souls I found none specially beautiful to me at all, at all,—­such my sad fate!  Of learned professors, I saw little, and that little was more than enough.  Tieck at Berlin, an old man, lame on a Sofa, I did love, and do; he is an exception, could I have seen much of him.  But on the whole Universal Puseyism seemed to me the humor of German, especially of Berlin thinkers;—­and I had some quite portentous specimens of that kind,—­unconscious specimens of four hundred quack power!  Truly and really the Prussian Soldiers, with their intelligent silence, with the touches of effective Spartanism I saw or fancied in them, were the class of people that pleased me best.  But see, my sheet is out!  I am still reading, reading, most nightmare Books about Fritz; but as to writing,—­Ach Gott! Never, never.—­Clough is coming home, I hope.—­Write soon, if you be not enchanted!

Yours ever,
       T. Carlyle

CLIIa.  Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 10 August, 1853

My Dear Carlyle,—­Your kindest letter, whose date I dare not count back to,—­perhaps it was May,—­I have just read again, to be deeply touched by its noble tragic tone of goodness to me, not without new wonder at my perversity, and terror at what both may be a-forging to strike me.  My slowness to write is a distemper that reaches all my correspondence, and not that with you only, though the circumstance is not worth stating, because, if I ceased to write to all the rest, there would yet be good reason for writing to you.  I believe the reason of this recusancy is the fear of disgusting my friends, as with a book open always at the same page.  For I have some experiences, that my interest in thoughts—­and to an end, perhaps, only of new thoughts and thinking—­outlasts that of all my reasonable neighbors, and offends, no doubt, by unhealthy pertinacity.  But though rebuked by a daily reduction to an absurd solitude, and by a score of disappointments with intellectual people, and in the face of a special hell provided for me in the Swedenborg Universe, I am yet confirmed in my madness by the scope and satisfaction I find in