I have nothing to tell you and no thoughts.  I have promised a course of Lectures for December, and am far from knowing what I am to say; but the way to make sure of fighting into the new continent is to burn your ships.  The “tender ears,” as George Fox said, of young men are always an effectual call to me ignorant to speak.  I find myself so much more and freer on the platform of the lecture-room than in the pulpit, that I shall not much more use the last; and do now only in a little country chapel at the request of simple men to whom I sustain no other relation than that of preacher.  But I preach in the Lecture-Room and then it tells, for there is no prescription.  You may laugh, weep, reason, sing, sneer, or pray, according to your genius.  It is the new pulpit, and very much in vogue with my northern countrymen.  This winter, in Boston, we shall have more than ever:  two or three every night of the week.  When will you come and redeem your pledge?  The day before yesterday my little boy was a year old,—­no, the day before that,—­and I cannot tell you what delight and what study I find in this little bud of God, which I heartily desire you also should see.  Good, wise, kind friend, I shall see you one day.  Let me hear, when you can write, that Mrs. Carlyle is well again.

—­R.  Waldo Emerson

XIX.  Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 8 December, 1837

My Dear Emerson,—­How long it is since you last heard of me I do not very accurately know; but it is too long.  A very long, ugly, inert, and unproductive chapter of my own history seems to have passed since then.  Whenever I delay writing, be sure matters go not well with me; and do you in that case write to me, were it again and over again,—­unweariable in pity.

I did go to Scotland, for almost three months; leaving my Wife here with her Mother.  The poor Wife had fallen so weak that she gave me real terror in the spring-time, and made the Doctor look very grave indeed:  she continued too weak for traveling:  I was worn out as I had never in my life been.  So, on the longest day of June, I got back to my Mother’s cottage; threw myself down, I may say, into what we may call the “frightfulest magnetic sleep,” and lay there avoiding the intercourse of men.  Most wearisome had their gabble become; almost unearthly.  But indeed all was unearthly in that humor.  The gushing of my native brooks, the sough of the old solitary woods, the great roar of old native Solway (billowing fresh out of your Atlantic, drawn by the Moon):  all this was a kind of unearthly music to me; I cannot tell you how unearthly.  It did not bring me to rest; yet towards rest I do think at all events, the time had come when I behoved to quit it again.  I have been here since September evidently another little “chapter” or paragraph, not altogether inert, is getting forward.