This Boston Transcendentalist, whatever the fate or merit of it prove to be, is surely an interesting symptom.  There must be things not dreamt of, over in that Transoceanic Parish!  I shall cordially wish well to this thing; and hail it as the sure forerunner of things better.  The Visible becomes the Bestial when it rests not on the Invisible.  Innumerable tumults of Metaphysic must be struggled through (whole generations perishing by the way), and at last Transcendentalism evolve itself (if I construe aright), as the Euthanasia of Metaphysic altogether.  May it be sure, may it be speedy!  Thou shalt open thy eyes, O Son of Adam; thou shalt look, and not forever jargon about laws of Optics and the making of spectacles!  For myself, I rejoice very much that I seem to be flinging aside innumerable sets of spectacles (could I but lay them aside,—­with gentleness!) and hope one day actually to see a thing or two.  Man lives by Belief (as it was well written of old); by logic he can only at best long to live.  Oh, I am dreadfully, afflicted with Logic here, and wish often (in my haste) that I had the besom of destruction to lay to it for a little!

“Why? and WHEREFORE?  God wot, simply THEREFORE!  Ask not WHY; ’t is SITH thou hast to care for.”

Since I wrote last to you, (which seems some three months ago,) there has a great mischance befallen me:  the saddest, I think, of the kind called Accidents I ever had to front.  By dint of continual endeavor for many weary weeks, I had got the first volume of that miserable French Revolution rather handsomely finished:  from amid infinite contradictions I felt as if my head were fairly above water, and I could go on writing my poor Book, defying the Devil and the World, with a certain degree of assurance, and even of joy.  A Friend borrowed this volume of Manuscript,—­a kind Friend but a careless one,—­to write notes on it, which he was well qualified to do.  One evening about two months ago he came in on us, “distraction (literally) in his aspect”; the Manuscript, left carelessly out, had been torn up as waste paper, and all but three or four tatters was clean gone!  I could not complain, or the poor man seemed as if he would have shot himself:  we had to gather ourselves together, and show a smooth front to it; which happily, though difficult, was not impossible to do.  I began again at the beginning; to such a wretched paralyzing torpedo of a task as my hand never found to do:  at which I have worn myself these two months to the hue of saffron, to the humor of incipient desperation; and now, four days ago, perceiving well that I was like a man swimming in an element that grew ever rarer, till at last it became vacuum (think of that!) I with a new effort of self-denial sealed up all the paper fragments, and said to myself:  In this mood thou makest no way, writest nothing that requires not to be erased again; lay it by for