I find I had never seen before. The old Cities
too are a little beautiful to me, in spite of my state
of nerves; honest, kindly people too, but sadly short
of our and your
despatch-of-business talents,—a
really painful defect in the long run. I was
on two of Fritz’s Battle-fields, moreover:
Lobositz in Bohemia, and Kunersdorf by Frankfurt
on the Oder; but did not, especially in the latter
case, make much of that. Schiller’s death-chamber,
Goethe’s sad Court-environment; above all, Luther’s
little room in the
Wartburg (I believe I actually
had tears in my eyes there, and kissed the old oak-table,
being in a very flurried state of nerves), my belief
was that under the Canopy there was not at present
so
holy a spot as that same. Of human
souls I found none specially beautiful to me at all,
at all,—such my sad fate! Of learned
professors, I saw little, and that little was more
than enough. Tieck at Berlin, an old man, lame
on a Sofa, I did love, and do; he is an exception,
could I have seen much of him. But on the whole
Universal Puseyism seemed to me the humor of
German, especially of Berlin thinkers;—and
I had some quite portentous specimens of that kind,—unconscious
specimens of four hundred quack power! Truly
and really the Prussian Soldiers, with their intelligent
silence, with the touches of effective Spartanism
I saw or fancied in them, were the class of people
that pleased me best. But see, my sheet is out!
I am still reading, reading, most nightmare Books
about Fritz; but as to writing,—
Ach
Gott! Never, never.—Clough is coming
home, I hope.—Write soon, if you be not
enchanted!
Yours ever,
T. Carlyle
CLIIa. Emerson to Carlyle
Concord, 10 August, 1853
My Dear Carlyle,—Your kindest letter, whose
date I dare not count back to,—perhaps
it was May,—I have just read again, to
be deeply touched by its noble tragic tone of goodness
to me, not without new wonder at my perversity, and
terror at what both may be a-forging to strike me.
My slowness to write is a distemper that reaches
all my correspondence, and not that with you only,
though the circumstance is not worth stating, because,
if I ceased to write to all the rest, there would
yet be good reason for writing to you. I believe
the reason of this recusancy is the fear of disgusting
my friends, as with a book open always at the same
page. For I have some experiences, that my interest
in thoughts—and to an end, perhaps, only
of new thoughts and thinking—outlasts that
of all my reasonable neighbors, and offends, no doubt,
by unhealthy pertinacity. But though rebuked
by a daily reduction to an absurd solitude, and by
a score of disappointments with intellectual people,
and in the face of a special hell provided for me
in the Swedenborg Universe, I am yet confirmed in
my madness by the scope and satisfaction I find in