I got the fatal First Volume finished (in the miserablest way, after great efforts) in October last; my head was all in a whirl; I fled to Scotland and my Mother for a month of rest.  Rest is nowhere for the Son of Adam:  all looked so “spectral” to me in my old-familiar Birthland; Hades itself could not have seemed stranger; Annandale also was part of the kingdom of TIME.  Since November I have worked again as I could; a second volume got wrapped up and sealed out of my sight within the last three days.  There is but a Third now:  one pull more, and then!  It seems to me, I will fly into some obscurest cranny of the world, and lie silent there for a twelvemonth.  The mind is weary, the body is very sick; a little black speck dances to and fro in the left eye (part of the retina protesting against the liver, and striking work):  I cannot help it; it must flutter and dance there, like a signal of distress, unanswered till I be done.  My familiar friends tell me farther that the Book is all wrong, style cramp, &c., &c.:  my friends, I answer, you are very right; but this also, Heaven be my witness, I cannot help.—­In such sort do I live here; all this I had to write you, if I wrote at all.

For the rest I cannot say that this huge blind monster of a City is without some sort of charm for me.  It leaves one alone, to go his own road unmolested.  Deep in your soul you take up your protest against it, defy it, and even despise it; but need not divide yourself from it for that.  Worthy individuals are glad to hear your thought, if it have any sincerity; they do not exasperate themselves or you about it; they have not even time for such a thing.  Nay, in stupidity itself on a scale of this magnitude, there is an impressiveness, almost a sublimity; one thinks how, in the words of Schiller, “the very Gods fight against it in vain”; how it lies on its unfathomable foundations there, inert yet peptic; nay, eupeptic; and is a Fact in the world, let theory object as it will.  Brown-stout, in quantities that would float a seventy-four, goes down the throats of men; and the roaring flood of life pours on;—­over which Philosophy and Theory are but a poor shriek of remonstrance, which oftenest were wiser, perhaps, to hold its peace.  I grow daily to honor Facts more and more, and Theory less and less.  A Fact, it seems to me, is a great thing:  a Sentence printed if not by God, then at least by the Devil;—­neither Jeremy Bentham nor Lytton Bulwer had a hand in that.

There are two or three of the best souls here I have known for long:  I feel less alone with them; and yet one is alone,—­a stranger and a pilgrim.  These friends expect mainly that the Church of England is not dead but asleep; that the leather coaches, with their gilt panels, can be peopled again with a living Aristocracy, instead of the simulacra of such.  I must altogether hold my peace to this, as I do to much.  Coleridge is the Father of all these. Ay de mi!