The work itself falling on me by driblets has not the right chance yet—­not till I get it in the bound state, and read it all at once—­to produce its due impression on me.  But I will say already of it, It is a sermon to me, as all your other deliberate utterances are; a real word, which I feel to be such,—­alas, almost or altogether the one such, in a world all full of jargons, hearsays, echoes, and vain noises, which cannot pass with me for words! This is a praise far beyond any “literary” one; literary praises are not worth repeating in comparison.  For the rest, I have to object still (what you will call objecting against the Law of Nature) that we find you a Speaker indeed, but as it were a Soliloquizer on the eternal mountain-tops only, in vast solitudes where men and their affairs lie all hushed in a very dim remoteness; and only the man and the stars and the earth are visible,—­whom, so fine a fellow seems he, we could perpetually punch into, and say, “Why won’t you come and help us then?  We have terrible need of one man like you down among us!  It is cold and vacant up there; nothing paintable but rainbows and emotions; come down, and you shall do life-pictures, passions, facts,—­which transcend all thought, and leave it stuttering and stammering!  To which he answers that he won’t, can’t, and doesn’t want to (as the Cockneys have it):  and so I leave him, and say, “You Western Gymnosophist!  Well, we can afford one man for that too.  But—!—­By the bye, I ought to say, the sentences are very brief; and did not, in my sheet reading, always entirely cohere for me.  Pure genuine Saxon; strong and simple; of a clearness, of a beauty—­But they did not, sometimes, rightly stick to their foregoers and their followers:  the paragraph not as a beaten ingot, but as a beautiful square bag of duck-shot held together by canvas!  I will try them again, with the Book deliberately before me.—­There are also one or two utterances about “Jesus,” “immortality,” and so forth, which will produce wide-eyes here and there.  I do not say it was wrong to utter them; a man obeys his own Daemon in these cases as his supreme law.  I dare say you are a little bored occasionally with “Jesus,” &c.,—­as I confess I myself am, when I discern what a beggarly Twaddle they have made of all that, what a greasy Cataplasm to lay to their own poltrooneries;- -and an impatient person may exclaim with Voltaire, in serious moments:  “Au nom de Dieu, ne me parlez plus de cet homme-la! I have had enough of him;—­I tell you I am alive too!”

Well, I have scribbled at a great rate; regardless of Time’s flight!—­My Wife thanks many times for M. Fuller’s Book.  I sent by Mr. James a small Packet of your letters—­which will make you sad to look at them!  Adieu, dear friend.

—­T.  Carlyle

XCVII.  Emerson to Carlyle