But I hailed even this need of taxing once more your often taxed courtesy, as a means to break up my long contumacy to-you-ward.  Please let not the wires be rusted out, so that we cannot weld them again, and let me feel the subtle fluid streaming strong.  Tell me what is become of Frederic, for whose appearance I have watched every week for months?  I am better ready for him, since one or two books about Voltaire, Maupertuis, and company, fell in my way.

Yet that book will not come which I most wish to read, namely, the culled results, the quintessence of private conviction, a liber veritatis, a few sentences, hints of the final moral you drew from so much penetrating inquest into past and present men.  All writing is necessitated to be exoteric, and written to a human should instead of to the terrible is.  And I say this to you, because you are the truest and bravest of writers.  Every writer is a skater, who must go partly where he would, and partly, where the skates carry him; or a sailor, who can only land where sails can be safely blown.  The variations to be allowed for in the surveyor’s compass are nothing like so large as those that must be allowed for in every book.  And a friendship of old gentlemen who have got rid of many illusions, survived their ambition, and blushes, and passion for euphony, and surface harmonies, and tenderness for their accidental literary stores, but have kept all their curiosity and awe touching the problems of man and fate and the Cause of causes,—­a friendship of old gentlemen of this fortune is looking more comely and profitable than anything I have read of love.  Such a dream flatters my incapacities for conversation, for we can all play at monosyllables, who cannot attempt the gay pictorial panoramic styles.

So, if ever I hear that you have betrayed the first symptom of age, that your back is bent a twentieth of an inch from the perpendicular, I shall hasten to believe you are shearing your prodigal overgrowths, and are calling in your troops to the citadel, and I may come in the first steamer to drop in of evenings and hear the central monosyllables.

Be good now again, and send me quickly—­though it be the shortest autograph certificate of....*

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* The end of this letter is lost.
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CLXIII.  Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 2 June, 1858

Dear Emerson,—­Glad indeed I am to hear of you on any terms, on any subject.  For the last eighteen months I have pretty much ceased all human correspondence,—­writing no Note that was not in a sense wrung from me; my one society the Nightmares (Prussian and other) all that while:—­but often and often the image of you, and the thoughts of old days between us, has risen sad upon me; and I have waited to get loose from the Nightmares to appeal to you again,—­to edacious Time and you.  Most likely in a couple