lecture upon these topics written for England may be read to America.  Evermore thanks for the brave stand you have made for Spiritualism in these writings.  But has literature any parallel to the oddity of the vehicle chosen to convey this treasure?  I delight in the contents; the form, which my defective apprehension for a joke makes me not appreciate, I leave to your merry discretion.  And yet did ever wise and philanthropic author use so defying a diction?  As if society were not sufficiently shy of truth without providing it beforehand with an objection to the form.  Can it be that this humor proceeds from a despair of finding a contemporary audience, and so the Prophet feels at liberty to utter his message in droll sounds.  Did you not tell me, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, sitting upon one of your broad hills, that it was Jesus Christ built Dunscore Kirk yonder?  If you love such sequences, then admit, as you will, that no poet is sent into the world before his time; that all the departed thinkers and actors have paved your way; that (at least when you surrender yourself) nations and ages do guide your pen, yes, and common goose-quills as well as your diamond graver.  Believe then that harp and ear are formed by one revolution of the wheel; that men are waiting to hear your epical song; and so be pleased to skip those excursive involved glees, and give us the simple air, without the volley of variations.  At least in some of your prefaces you should give us the theory of your rhetoric.  I comprehend not why you should lavish in that spendthrift style of yours celestial truths.  Bacon and Plato have something too solid to say than that they can afford to be humorists.  You are dispensing that which is rarest, namely, the simplest truths,—­truths which lie next to consciousness, and which only the Platos and Goethes perceive.  I look for the hour with impatience when the vehicle will be worthy of the spirit,—­when the word will be as simple, and so as resistless, as the thought,—­and, in short, when your words will be one with things.  I have no hope that you will find suddenly a large audience.  Says not the sarcasm, “Truth hath the plague in his house”?  Yet all men are potentially (as Mr. Coleridge would say) your audience, and if you will not in very Mephistophelism repel and defy them, shall be actually;* and whatever the great or the small may say about the charm of diabolism, a true and majestic genius can afford to despise it.

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* This year, 1882, seventy thousand copies of a sixpenny edition
of Sartor Resartus have been sold.
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I venture to amuse you with this homiletic criticism because it is the sense of uncritical truth seekers, to whom you are no more than Hecuba, whose instincts assure them that there is Wisdom in this grotesque Teutonic apocalyptic strain of yours, but that ’t is hence hindered in its effect.  And though with all my heart I would stand well with my Poet, yet if I offend I shall quietly retreat into my Universal relations, wherefrom I affectionately espy you as a man, myself as another.