gold blazonry and fierce gig-wheels, have little incommoded him; they going their way, he going his.—­As for the results of the Book, I can rationally promise myself, on the economical, pecuniary, or otherwise worldly side, simply zero. It is a Book contradicting all rules of Formalism, that have not a Reality within them, which so few have;—­testifying, the more quietly the worse, internecine war with Quacks high and low.  My good Brother, who was with me out of Italy in summer, declared himself shocked, and almost terror-struck:  “Jack,” I answered, “innumerable men give their lives cheerfully to defend Falsehoods and Half-Falsehoods; why should not one writer give his life cheerfully to say, in plain Scotch-English, in the hearing of God and man, To me they seem false and half-false?  At all events, thou seest, I cannot help it.  It is the nature of the beast.”  So that, on the whole, I suppose there is no more unpromotable, unappointable man now living in England than I. Literature also, the miscellaneous place of refuge, seems done here, unless you will take the Devil’s wages for it; which one does not incline to do.  A disjectum membrum; cut off from relations with men?  Verily so; and now forty years of age; and extremely dyspeptical:  a hopeless-looking man.  Yet full of what I call desperate-hope!  One does verily stand on the Earth, a Star-dome encompassing one; seemingly accoutred and enlisted and sent to battle, with rations good, indifferent, or bad,—­what can one do but in the name of Odin, Tuisco, Hertha, Horsa, and all Saxon and Hebrew Gods, fight it out?—­This surely is very idle talk.

As to the Book, I do say seriously that it is a wild, savage, ruleless, very bad Book; which even you will not be able to like; much less any other man.  Yet it contains strange things; sincerities drawn out of the heart of a man very strangely situated; reverent of nothing but what is reverable in all ages and places:  so we will print it, and be done with it;—­and try a new turn next time.  What I am to do, were the thing done, you see therefore, is most uncertain.  How gladly would I run to Concord!  And if I were there, be sure the do-nothing arrangement is the only conceivable one for me.  That my sick existence subside again, this is the first condition; that quiet vision be restored me.  It is frightful what an impatience I have got for many kinds of fellow-creatures.  Their jargon really hurts me like the shrieking of inarticulate creatures that ought to articulate.  There is no resource but to say:  Brother, thou surely art not hateful; thou art lovable, at lowest pitiable;—­ alas! in my case, thou art dreadfully wearisome, unedifying:  go thy ways, with my blessing.  There are hardly three people among these two millions, whom I care much to exchange words with, in the humor I have.  Nevertheless, at bottom, it is not my purpose to quit London finally till I have as it were seen