books home; and are only in these weeks striving to get one:* think of that!  The worst is the sore tear and wear of this huge roaring Niagara of things on such a poor excitable set of nerves as mine.  The velocity of all things, of the very word you hear on the streets, is at railway rate:  joy itself is unenjoyable, to be avoided like pain; there is no wish one has so pressing as for quiet.  Ah me!  I often swear I will be buried at least in free breezy Scotland, out of this insane hubbub, where Fate tethers me in life!  If Fate always tether me;—­but if ever the smallest competence of worldly means be mine, I will fly this whirlpool as I would the Lake of Malebolge, and only visit it now and then!  Yet perhaps it is the proper place after all, seeing all places are improper:  who knows?  Meanwhile I lead a most dyspeptic, solitary, self-shrouded life:  consuming, if possible in silence, my considerable daily allotment of pain; glad when any strength is left in me for working, which is the only use I can see in myself,—­too rare a case of late.  The ground of my existence is black as Death; too black, when all void too but at times there paint themselves on it pictures of gold and rainbow and lightning; all the brighter for the black ground, I suppose.  Withal I am very much of a fool.—­Some people will have me write on Cromwell, which I have been talking about.  I do read on that and English subjects, finding that I know nothing and that nobody knows anything of that:  but whether anything will come of it remains to be seen.  Mill, the Westminster friend, is gone in bad health to the Continent, and has left a rude Aberdeen Longear, a great admirer of mine too, with whom I conjecture I cannot act at all:  so good-bye to that.  The wisest of all, I do believe, were that I bought my nag Yankee and set to galloping about the elevated places here!  A certain Mr. Coolidge,** a Boston man of clear iron visage and character, came down to me the other day with Sumner; he left a newspaper fragment, containing “the Socinian Pope’s denunciation of Emerson.”

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* The beginning of the London Library, a most useful institution,
from which books may be borrowed.   It served Carlyle well in
later years, and for a long time he was President of it.

** The late Mr. Joseph Coolidge.
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The thing denounced had not then arrived, though often asked for at Kennet’s; it did not arrive till yesterday, but had lain buried in bales of I know not what.  We have read it only once, and are not yet at the bottom of it.  Meanwhile, as I judge, the Socinian “tempest in a washbowl” is all according to nature, and will be profitable to you, not hurtful.  A man is called to let his light shine before men; but he ought to understand better and better what medium it is through, what retinas it falls on:  wherefore look there. I find in this, as in the two other Speeches, that