My poor Wife is still weak, overshadowed with sorrow:  her loss is great, the loss almost as of the widow’s mite; for except her good Mother she had almost no kindred left; and as for friends—­ they are not rife in this world.—­God be thanked withal they are not entirely non-extant!  Have I not a Friend, and Friends, though they too are in sorrow?  Good be with you all.

—­T.  Carlyle.

By far the valuablest thing that Alcott brought me was the Newspaper report of Emerson’s last Lectures in New York.  Really a right wholesome thing; radiant, fresh as the morning; a thing worth reading; which accordingly I clipped from the Newspaper, and have in a state of assiduous circulation to the comfort of many.—­I cannot bid you quit the Dial, though it, too, alas, is Antinomian somewhat! Perge, perge, nevertheless.  —­And so now an end.

—­T.  C.

LXXVIII.  Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 29 August, 1842

My Dear.  Emerson,—­This, morning your new Letter, of the 15th August, has arrived;* exactly one fortnight old:  thanks to the gods and steam-demons!  I already, perhaps six weeks ago, answered your former Letter,—­acknowledging the manna-gift of the L51, and other things; nor do I think the Letter can have been lost, for I remember putting it into the Post-Office myself.  Today I am on the eve of an expedition into Suffolk, and full of petty business:  however, I will throw you one word, were it only to lighten my own heart a little.  You are a kind friend to me, and a precious;—­and when I mourn over the impotence of Human Speech, and how each of us, speak or write as he will, has to stand dumb, cased up in his own unutterabilities, before his unutterable Brother, I feel always as if Emerson were the man I could soonest try to speak with,—­were I within reach of him!  Well; we must be content.  A pen is a pen, and worth something; though it expresses about as much of a man’s meaning perhaps as the stamping of a hoof will express of a horse’s meaning; a very poor expression indeed!

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* This letter of 15th August is missing.
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Your bibliopolic advice about Cromwell or my next Book shall be carefully attended, if I live ever to write another Book!  But I have again got down into primeval Night; and live alone and mute with the Manes, as you say; uncertain whether I shall ever more see day.  I am partly ashamed of myself; but cannot help it.  One of my grand difficulties I suspect to be that I cannot write two Books at once; cannot be in the seventeenth century and in the nineteenth at one and the same moment; a feat which excels even that of the Irishman’s bird:  “Nobody but a bird can be in two places at once!” For my heart is sick and sore in behalf of my own poor generation; nay, I feel withal as if the one hope of help for it consisted in the possibility of new Cromwells and new Puritans:  thus do the two centuries stand related to me, the seventeenth worthless except precisely in so far as it can be made the nineteenth; and yet let anybody try that enterprise!  Heaven help me.—­I believe at least that I ought to hold my tongue; more especially at present.