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* The sketches were published the next year in a volume under
the title of The Gallery of Literary Portraits.
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John Sterling’s Dial shall be forwarded to Ventnor in the Isle of Wight, whenever it arrives.  He was here, as probably I told you, about two months ago, the old unresting brilliantly radiating man.  He is now much richer in money than he was, and poorer by the loss of a good Mother and good Wife:  I understand he is building himself a brave house, and also busy writing a poem.  He flings too much “sheet-lightning” and unrest into me when we meet in these low moods of mine; and yet one always longs for him back again:  “No doing with him or without him,” the dog!

My thrice unfortunate Book on Cromwell,—­it is a real descent to Hades, to Golgotha and Chaos!  I feel oftenest as if it were possibler to die one’s self than to bring it into life.  Besides, my health is in general altogether despicable, my “spirits” equal to those of the ninth part of a dyspeptic tailor!  One needs to be able to go on in all kinds of spirits, in climate sunny or sunless, or it will never do.  The planet Earth, says Voss,—­take four hexameters from Voss: 

Journeys this Earth, her eye on a Sun, through the heavenly spaces; Joyous in radiance, or joyless by fits and swallowed in tempests; Falters not, alters not, equal advancing, home at the due hour:  So thou, weather-proof, constant, may, equal with day, March!

I have not a moment more tonight;—­and besides am inclined to write unprofitables if I persist.  Adieu, my friend; all blessings be with you always.

Yours ever truly,
             T. Carlyle

XC.  Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 29 February, 1844

My Dear Carlyle,—­I received by the last steamer your letter, and its prefixed order for one hundred and twenty-one dollars, which order I sent to Ward, who turned it at once into money.  Thanks, dear friend, for your care and activity, which have brought me this pleasing and most unlooked for result.  And I beg you, if you know any family representative of Mr. Fraser, to express my sense of obligation to that departed man.  I feel a kindness not without some wonder for those good-natured five hundred Englishmen who could buy and read my miscellany.  I shall not fail to send them a new collection, which I hope they will like better.  My faith in the Writers, as an organic class, increases daily, and in the possibility to a faithful man of arriving at statements for which he shall not feel responsible, but which shall be parallel with nature.  Yet without any effort I fancy I make progress also in the doctrine of Indifferency, and am certain and content that the truth can very well spare me, and have itself spoken by another without leaving it or me the worse.  Enough if we have learned that music exists, that it is proper to us, and that we cannot go forth of it.  Our pipes, however shrill and squeaking, certify this our faith in Tune, and the eternal Amelioration may one day reach our ears and instruments.  It is a poor second thought, this literary activity.