Forget my short-comings and write to me.  Miss Bacon sends me word, again and again, of your goodness.  Against hope and sight she must be making a remarkable book.  I have a letter from her, a few days ago, written in perfect assurance of success!  Kindest remembrances to your wife and to your brother.

Yours faithfully,
             R.W.  Emerson

CLVII.  Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 18 May, 1855

Dear Emerson,—­Last Sunday, Clough was here; and we were speaking about you, (much to your discredit, you need not doubt,) and how stingy in the way of Letters you were grown; when, next morning, your Letter itself made its appearance.  Thanks, thanks.  You know not in the least, I perceive, nor can be made to understand at all, how indispensable your Letters are to me.  How you are, and have for a long time been, the one of all the sons of Adam who, I felt, completely understood what I was saying; and answered with a truly human voice,—­inexpressibly consolatory to a poor man, in his lonesome pilgrimage, towards the evening of the day!  So many voices are not human; but more or less bovine, porcine, canine; and one’s soul dies away in sorrow in the sound of them, and is reduced to a dialogue with the “Silences,” which is of a very abstruse nature!—­Well, whether you write to me or not, I reserve to myself the privilege of writing to you, so long as we both continue in this world!  As the beneficent Presences vanish from me, one after the other, those that remain are the more precious, and I will not part with them, not with the chief of them, beyond all.

This last year has been a grimmer lonelier one with me than any I can recollect for a long time.  I did not go to the Country at all in summer or winter; refused even my Christmas at The Grange with the Ashburtons,—­it was too sad an anniversary for me;—­I have sat here in my garret, wriggling and wrestling on the worst terms with a Task that I cannot do, that generally seems to me not worth doing, and yet must be done. These are truly the terms.  I never had such a business in my life before.  Frederick himself is a pretty little man to me, veracious, courageous, invincible in his small sphere; but he does not rise into the empyrean regions, or kindle my heart round him at all; and his history, upon which there are wagon-loads of dull bad books, is the most dislocated, unmanageably incoherent, altogether dusty, barren and beggarly production of the modern Muses as given hitherto.  No man of genius ever saw him with eyes, except twice Mirabeau, for half an hour each time.  And the wretched Books have no indexes, no precision of detail; and I am far away from Berlin and the seat of information;—­and, in brief, shall be beaten miserably with this unwise enterprise in my old days; and (in fine) will consent to be so, and get through it if I can before I die.