“Wi’ sic as he, where’er he be,
     May I be saved or damned!”

Oime! what a foolish goose of a world this is!  If it were not [for] here and there an articulate-speaking man, one would be all-too lonely.

This is nothing at all like the letter I meant to write you; but I will write again, I trust, in few days, and the first paragraph shall, if possible, hold all the business.  I have much to tell you, which perhaps is as well not written.  O that I did see you face to face!  But the time shall come, if Heaven will.  Why not you come over, since I cannot?  There is a room here, there is welcome here, and two friends always.  It must be done one way or the other.  I will take, care of your messages to Sterling.  He is in Florence; he was the Author of Montaigne.* The Foreign Quarterly Reviewer of Strauss I take to be one Blackie, an Advocate in Edinburgh, a frothy, semi-confused disciple of mine and other men’s; I guess this, but I have not read the Article:  the man Blackie is from Aberdeen, has been roaming over Europe, and carries more sail than ballast.  Brother John, spoken of above, is knocking at the door even now; he is for Italy again, we expect, in few days, on a better appointment:  know that you have a third friend in him under this roof,—­a man who quarrels with me all day in a small way, and loves me with the whole soul of him.  My Wife demanded to have “room for one line.”  What she is to write I know not, except it be what she has said, holding up the pamphlet, “Is it not a noble thing?  None of them all but he,” &c., &c.  I will write again without delay when the stray volumes arrive; before that if they linger.  Commend me to all the kind household of Concord:  Wife, Mother, and Son.

Ever yours,
           T. Carlyle

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* See ante, p. 184.   Sterling’s essay on Montaigne was his
first contribution, in 1837, to the London and Westminster
Review.  It is reprinted in “Essays and Tales, by John Sterling,
collected and edited, with a Memoir of his Life, by Julius
Charles Hare,” London, 1848, Vol.  I. p. 129.
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"Forgotten you?" O, no indeed!  If there were nothing else to remember you by, I should never forget the Visitor, who years ago in the Desert descended on us, out of the clouds as it were, and made one day there look like enchantment for us, and left me weeping that it was only one day.  When I think of America, it is of you,—­neither Harriet Martineau nor any one else succeeds in giving me a more extended idea of it.  When I wish to see America it is still you, and those that are yours.  I read all that you write with an interest which I feel in no other writing but my Husband’s,—­or it were nearer the truth to say there is no other writing of living men but yours and his that I can read.  God Bless you and Weib and Kind.  Surely I shall some day see you all.