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* This sentence is a variation on one at the beginning of the
article on Scott.
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Curious:  your Course of Lectures “on Human Culture” seems to be on the very subject I am to discourse upon here in May coming; but I am to call it “on the History of Literature,” and speak it, not write it.  While you read this, I shall be in the agonies!  Ah me! often when I think of the matter, how my one sole wish is to be left to hold my tongue, and by what bayonets of Necessity clapt to my back I am driven into that Lecture-room, and in what mood, and ordered to speak or die, I feel as if my only utterance should be a flood of tears and blubbering!  But that, clearly, will not do.  Then again I think it is perhaps better so; who knows?  At all events, we will try what is in this Lecturing in London.  If something, well; if nothing, why also well.  But I do want to get out of these coils for a tune.  My Brother is to be home again in May; if he go back to Italy, if our Lecturing proved productive, why might we not all set off thitherward for the winter coming?  There is a dream to that effect.  It would suit my wife, too:  she was alarmingly weak this time twelvemonth; and I can only yet tell you that she is stronger, not strong:  she has not ventured out except at midday, and rarely then, since Autumn last; she sits here patiently waiting Summer, and charges me to send you her love.—­America also always lies in the background:  I do believe, if I live long, I shall get to Concord one day.  Your wife must love me.  If the little Boy be a well-behaved fellow, he shall ride on my back yet:  if not, tell him I will have nothing to do with him, the riotous little imp that he is.  And so God bless you always, my dear friend!  Your affectionate,

—­T.  Carlyle

XXIII.  Emerson to Carlyle*

Concord, 10 May, 1888

My Dear Friend,—­Yesterday I had your letter of March.  It quickens my purpose (always all but ripe) to write to you.  If it had come earlier I should have been confirmed in my original purpose of publishing Select Miscellanies of T.C. As it is, we are far on in the printing of the first two volumes (to make 900 pages) of the papers as they stand in your list.  And now I find we shall only get as far as the seventeenth or eighteenth article.  I regret it, because this book will not embrace those papers I chiefly desire to provide people with, and it may be some time, in these years of bankruptcy and famine, before we shall think it prudent to publish two volumes more.  But Loring is a good man, and thinks that many desire to see the sources of Nile.  I, for my part, fancy that to meet the taste of the readers we should publish from the last backwards, beginning with the paper on Scott, which has had the best reception ever known.  Carlyleism is becoming so fashionable that the most austere Seniors are glad to qualify their reprobation