and printers for a volume of poems that I have seriously taken in hand the collection, transcription, or scription of such a volume, and may do the enormity before New Year’s day.  Fear not, dear friend, you shall not have to read one line.  Perhaps I shall send you an official copy, but I shall appeal to the tenderness of Jane Carlyle, and excuse your formidable self, for the benefit of us both.  Where all writing is such a caricature of the subject, what signifies whether the form is a little more or less ornate and luxurious?  Meantime, I think to set a few heads before me, as good texts for winter evening entertainments.  I wrote a deal about Napoleon a few months ago, after reading a library of memoirs.  Now I have Plato, Montaigne, and Swedenborg, and more in the clouds behind.  What news of Naseby and Worcester?

CI.  Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 29 August, 1845

Dear Emerson,—­Your Letter, which had been very long expected, has been in my hand above a month now; and still no answer sent to it.  I thought of answering straightway; but the day went by, days went by;—­and at length I decided to wait till my insupportable Burden (the “Stupidity of Two Centuries” as I call it, which is a heavy load for one man!) were rolled off my shoulders, and I could resume the habit of writing Letters, which has almost left me for many months.  By the unspeakable blessing of Heaven that consummation has now arrived, about four days ago I wrote my last word on Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches; and one of the earliest uses I make of my recovered freedom is to salute you again.  The Book is nearly printed:  two big volumes; about a half of it, I think, my own; the real utterances of the man Oliver Cromwell once more legible to earnest men.  Legible really to an unexpected extent:  for the Book took quite an unexpected figure in my hands; and is now a kind of Life of Oliver, the best that circumstances would permit me to do:—­ whether either I or England shall be, in my time, fit for a better, remains submitted to the Destinies at present.  I have tied up the whole Puritan Paper-Litter (considerable masses of it still unburnt) with tight strings, and hidden it at the bottom of my deepest repositories:  there shall it, if Heaven please, lie dormant for a time and times.  Such an element as I have been in, no human tongue can give account of.  The disgust of my Soul has been great; a really pious labor:  worth very little when I have done it; but the best I could do; and that is quite enough.  I feel the liveliest gratitude to the gods that I have got out of it alive.  The Book is very dull, but it is actually legible:  all the ingenious faculty I had, and ten times as much would have been useful there, has been employed in elucidation; in saying, and chiefly in forbearing to say,—­in annihilating continents of brutal wreck and dung:  Ach Gott!—­But