—­R.W.  Emerson

CXLVIII.  Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 7 May, 1852

Dear Emerson,—­I was delighted at the sight of your hand again.  My manifold sins against you, involuntary all of them I may well say, are often enough present to my sad thoughts; and a kind of remorse is mixed with the other sorrow,—­as if I could have helped growing to be, by aid of time and destiny, the grim Ishmaelite I am, and so shocking your serenity by my ferocities!  I admit you were like an angel to me, and absorbed in the beautifulest manner all thunder-clouds into the depths of your immeasurable a ether;—­and it is indubitable I love you very well, and have long done, and mean to do.  And on the whole you will have to rally yourself into some kind of Correspondence with me again; I believe you will find that also to be a commanded duty by and by!  To me at any rate, I can say, it is a great want, and adds perceptibly to the sternness of these years:  deep as is my dissent from your Gymnosophist view of Heaven and Earth, I find an agreement that swallows up all conceivable dissents; in the whole world I hardly get, to my spoken human word, any other word of response which is authentically human. God help us, this is growing a very lonely place, this distracted dog-kennel of a world!  And it is no joy to me to see it about to have its throat cut for its immeasurable devilries; that is not a pleasant process to be concerned in either more or less,—­ considering above all how many centuries, base and dismal all of them, it is like to take!  Nevertheless Marchons,—­and swift too, if we have any speed, for the sun is sinking....  Poor Margaret, that is a strange tragedy that history of hers; and has many traits of the Heroic in it, though it is wild as the prophecy of a Sibyl.  Such a predetermination to eat this big Universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her heart could conceive, I have not before seen in any human soul.  Her “mountain me” indeed:—­ but her courage too is high and clear, her chivalrous nobleness indeed is great; her veracity, in its deepest sense, a toute epreuve.—­Your Copy of the Book* came to me at last (to my joy):  I had already read it; there was considerable notice taken of it here; and one half-volume of it (and I grieve to say only one, written by a man called Emerson) was completely approved by me and innumerable judges.  The rest of the Book is not without considerable geniality and merits; but one wanted a clear concise Narrative beyond all other merits; and if you ask here (except in that half-volume) about any fact, you are answered (so to speak) not in words, but by a symbolic tune on the bagpipe, symbolic burst of wind-music from the brass band;—­which is not the plan at all!—­What can have become of Mazzini’s Letter, which he certainly did write and despatched to you, is not easily conceivable.