“style,” the treatment and expression,—­yes, it is inimitable, best—­Emersonian throughout.  Such brevity, simplicity, softness, homely grace; with such a penetrating meaning, soft enough, but irresistible, going down to the depths and up to the heights, as silent electricity goes.  You have done very well; and many will know it ever better by degrees.—­Only one thing farther I will note:  How you go as if altogether on the “Over-Soul,” the Ideal, the Perfect or Universal and Eternal in this life of ours; and take so little heed of the frightful quantities of friction and perverse impediment there everywhere are; the reflections upon which in my own poor life made me now and then very sad, as I read you.  Ah me, ah me; what a vista it is, mournful, beautiful, unfathomable as Eternity itself, these last fifty years of Time to me.—­

Let me not forget to thank you for that fourth page of your Note; I should say it was almost the most interesting of all.  News from yourself at first hand; a momentary glimpse into the actual Household at Concord, face to face, as in years of old!  True, I get vague news of you from time to time; but what are these in comparison?—­If you will, at the eleventh hour, turn over a new leaf, and write me Letters again,—­but I doubt you won’t. And yet were it not worth while, think you? [Greek]—­ will be here anon.—­My kindest regards to your wife.  Adieu, my ever-kind Old Friend.

Yours faithfully always,
                    T. Carlyle

CLXXXIV.  Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 17 June, 1870

My Dear Carlyle,—­Two* unanswered letters filled and fragrant and potent with goodness will not let me procrastinate another minute, or I shall sink and deserve to sink into my dormouse condition.  You are of the Anakim, and know nothing of the debility and postponement of the blonde constitution.  Well, if you shame us by your reservoir inexhaustible of force, you indemnify and cheer some of us, or one of us, by charges of electricity.

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* One seems to be missing.
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Your letter of April came, as ever-more than ever, if possible—­ full of kindness, and making much of our small doings and writings, and seemed to drive me to instant acknowledgment; but the oppressive engagement of writing and reading eighteen lectures on Philosophy to a class of graduates in the College, and these in six successive weeks, was a task a little more formidable in prospect and in practice than any foregoing one.  Of course, it made me a prisoner, took away all rights of friendship, honor, and justice, and held me to such frantic devotion to my work as must spoil that also.