But I must not speak of these things.  How can I speak of them on a miserable scrap of blue paper?  Looking into your kind-eyes with my eyes, I could speak:  not here.  Pity me, my friend, my brother; yet hope well of me:  if I can (in all senses) rightly hold my peace, I think much will yet be well with me.  SILENCE is the great thing I worship at present; almost the sole tenant of my Pantheon.  Let a man know rightly how to hold his peace.  I love to repeat to myself, “Silence is of Eternity.”  Ah me, I think how I could rejoice to quit these jarring discords and jargonings of Babel, and go far, far away!  I do believe, if I had the smallest competence of money to get “food and warmth” with, I would shake the mud of London from my feet, and go and bury myself in some green place, and never print any syllable more.  Perhaps it is better as it is.

But quitting this, we will actually speak (under favor of “Silence”) one very small thing; a pleasant piece of news.  There is a man here called John Sterling (Reverend John of the Church of England too), whom I love better than anybody I have met with, since a certain sky-messenger alighted to me at Craigenputtock, and vanished in the Blue again.  This Sterling has written; but what is far better, he has lived, he is alive.  Across several unsuitable wrappages, of Church-of-Englandism and others, my heart loves the man.  He is one, and the best, of a small class extant here, who, nigh drowning in a black wreck of Infidelity (lighted up by some glare of Radicalism only, now growing dim too) and about to perish, saved themselves into a Coleridgian Shovel-hattedness, or determination to preach, to preach peace, were it only the spent echo of a peace once preached.  He is still only about thirty; young; and I think will shed the shovel-hat yet perhaps.  Do you ever read Blackwood? This John Sterling is the “New Contributor” whom Wilson makes such a rout about, in the November and prior month “Crystals from a Cavern,” &c., which it is well worth your while to see.  Well, and what then, cry you?—­Why then, this John Sterling has fallen overhead in love with a certain Waldo Emerson; that is all.  He saw the little Book Nature lying here; and, across a whole silva silvarum of prejudices, discerned what was in it; took it to his heart,—­and indeed into his pocket; and has carried it off to Madeira with him; whither unhappily (though now with good hope and expectation) the Doctors have ordered him.  This is the small piece of pleasant news, that two sky-messengers (such they were both of them to me) have met and recognized each other; and by God’s blessing there shall one day be a trio of us:  call you that nothing?