it out. In the very hugeness of the monstrous City, contradiction cancelling contradiction, one finds a sort of composure for one’s self that is not to be met with elsewhere perhaps in the world:  people tolerate you, were it only that they have not time to trouble themselves with you.  Some individuals even love me here; there are one or two whom I have even learned to love,—­though, for the present, cross circumstances have snatched them out of my orbit again mostly.  Wherefore, if you ask me, What I am to do?—­the answer is clear so far, “Rest myself awhile”; and all farther is as dark as Chaos.  Now for resting, taking that by itself, my Brother, who has gone back to Rome with some thoughts of settling as a Physician there, presses me to come thither, and rest in Rome.  On the other hand, a certain John Sterling (the best man I have found in these regions) has been driven to Bordeaux lately for his health; he will have it that I must come to him, and walk through the South of France to Dauphine, Avignon, and over the Alps next spring!* Thirdly, my Mother will have me return to Annandale, and lie quiet in her little habitation;—­which I incline to think were the wisest course of all.  And lastly from over the Atlantic comes my good Emerson’s voice.  We will settle nothing, except that all shall remain unsettled. Die Zukunft decket Schmerzen and Glucke.

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* In his Life of Sterling, Carlyle prints a letter from
Sterling to himself, dated Bordeaux, October 26, 1836, in which
Sterling urges him to come “in the first fine days of spring.” 
It must have reached him a few days before he wrote this letter
to Emerson.
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I ought to say, however, that about New-year’s-day I will send you an Article on Mirabeau, which they have printed here (for a thing called the London Review), and some kind of Note to escort it.  I think Pamphlets travel as Letters in New England, provided you leave the ends of them open:  if I be mistaken, pray instruct Messrs. Barnard to refuse the thing, for it has small value. The Diamond Necklace is to be printed also, in Fraser; inconceivable hawking that poor Paper has had; till now Fraser takes it—­for L50:  not being able to get it for nothing.  The Mirabeau was written at the passionate request of John Mill; and likewise for needful lucre.  I think it is the first shilling of money I have earned by my craft these four years:  where the money I have lived on has come from while I sat here scribbling gratis, amazes me to think; yet surely it has come (for I am still here), and Heaven only to thank for it, which is a great fact.  As for Mill’s London Review (for he is quasi-editor), I do not recommend it to you.  Hide-bound Radicalism; a to me well-nigh insupportable thing!  Open it not:  a breath as of Sahara and the Infinite Sterile comes from every page of it.  A young Radical Baronet* has laid