It is pity they should ever be disjoined; yet of the two, if one must, in this mad Earth, be dispensed with, it is really wise to say at all hazards, Be it the wages then.  This Brother (if the Heavens have been kind to me) must be in Paris one of these days; then here speedily; and “the House must resolve itself into a Committee”—­of ways and means.  Add to all this, that I myself have been and am one of the stupidest of living men; in one of my vacant, interlunar conditions, unfit for deciding on anything:  were I to give you my actual view of this case, it were a view such as Satan had from the pavilion of the Anarch old.  Alas! it is all too like Chaos:  confusion of dense and rare:  I also know what it is to drop plumb, fluttering my pennons vain,—­for a series of weeks.

One point only is clear:  that you, my Friend, are very friendly to me; that New England is as much my country and home as Old England.  Very singular and very pleasant it is to me to feel as if I had a house of my own in that far country:  so many leagues and geographical degrees of wild-weltering “unfruitful brine”; and then the hospitable hearth and the smiles of brethren awaiting one there!  What with railways, steamships, printing presses, it has surely become a most monstrous “tissue,” this life of ours; if evil and confusion in the one Hemisphere, then good and order in the other, a man knows not how:  and so it rustles forth, immeasurable, from “that roaring Loom of Time,”—­miraculous ever as of old!  To Ralph Waldo Emerson, however, and those that love me as he, be thanks always, and a sure place in the sanctuary of the mind.  Long shall we remember that Autumn Sunday that landed him (out of Infinite Space) on the Craigenputtock wilderness, not to leave us as he found us.  My Wife says, whatever I decide on, I cannot thank you too heartily;—­which really is very sound doctrine.  I write to tell you so much; and that you shall hear from me again when there is more to tell.

It does seem next to certain to me that I could preach a very considerable quantity of things from that Boston Pulpit, such as it is,—­were I once fairly started.  If so, what an unspeakable relief were it too!  Of the whole mountain of miseries one grumbles at in this life, the central and parent one, as I often say, is that you cannot utter yourself.  The poor soul sits struggling, impatient, longing vehemently out towards all corners of the Universe, and cannot get its hest delivered, not even so far as the voice might do it.  Imprisoned, enchanted, like the Arabian Prince with half his body marble:  it is really bad work.  Then comes bodily sickness; to act and react, and double the imbroglio.  Till at last, I suppose, one does rise, like Eliphaz the Temanite; states that his inner man is bursting (as if filled with carbonic acid and new wine), that by the favor of Heaven he will speak a word or two.  Would it were come so far,—­ if it be ever to come!