Thanks for asking me to write you a word in the Dial. Had such a purpose struck me long ago, there have been many things passing through my head,—­march-marching as they ever do, in long drawn, scandalous Falstaff-regiments (a man ashamed to be seen passing through Coventry with such a set!)—­some one of which, snatched out of the ragged rank, and dressed and drilled a little, might perhaps fitly have been saved from Chaos, and sent to the Dial. In future we shall be on the outlook.  I love your Dial, and yet it is with a kind of shudder.  You seem to me in danger of dividing yourselves from the Fact of this present Universe, in which alone, ugly as it is, can I find any anchorage, and soaring away after Ideas, Beliefs, Revelations, and such like,—­into perilous altitudes, as I think; beyond the curve of perpetual frost, for one thing!  I know not how to utter what impression you give me; take the above as some stamping of the fore-hoof.  Surely I could wish you returned into your own poor nineteenth century, its follies and maladies, its blind or half-blind, but gigantic toilings, its laughter and its tears, and trying to evolve in some measure the hidden Godlike that lies in it;—­that seems to me the kind of feat for literary men.  Alas, it is so easy to screw one’s self up into high and ever higher altitudes of Transcendentalism, and see nothing under one but the everlasting snows of Himmalayah, the Earth shrinking to a Planet, and the indigo firmament sowing itself with daylight stars; easy for you, for me:  but whither does it lead?  I dread always, To inanity and mere injuring of the lungs!—­“Stamp, Stamp, Stamp!”—­ Well, I do believe, for one thing, a man has no right to say to his own generation, turning quite away from it, “Be damned!” It is the whole Past and the whole Future, this same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very wretched generation of ours.  Come back into it, I tell you;—­and so for the present will “stamp” no more....

Adieu, my friend; I must not add a word more.  My Wife is out on a visit; it is to bring her back that I am now setting forth for Suffolk.  I hope to see Ely too, and St. Ives, and Huntingdon, and various Cromwelliana. My blessings on the Concord Household now and always.  Commend me expressly to your Wife and your Mother.  Farewell, dear friend.

—­T.  Carlyle

LXXIX.  Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 15 October, 1842

My Dear Carlyle,—­I am in your debt for at least two letters since I sent you any word.  I should be well content to receive one of these stringent epistles of bark and steel and mellow wine with every day’s post, but as there is no hope that more will be sent without my writing to signify that these have come, I hereby certify that I love you well and prize all your messages.  I read with special interest what you say of these English