proof-sheets. They are probably still rolling somewhere outside
of this port, for all our packetships have had the longest
passages: only one has come in for many a week. We will be as
patient as we can.
--------
* This letter appeared in the _Athenaeum,_ for July 22, 1882
--------
I am here on a visit to my brother, who is a lawyer in this city,
and lives at Staten Island, at a distance of half an hour's sail.
The city has such immense natural advantages and such
capabilities of boundless growth, and such varied and ever
increasing accommodations and appliances for eye and ear, for
memory and wit, for locomotion and lavation, and all manner of
delectation, that I see that the poor fellows that live here do
get some compensation for the sale of their souls. And how they
multiply! They estimate the population today at 350,000, and
forty years ago, it is said, there were but 20,000. But I always
seem to suffer some loss of faith on entering cities. They are
great conspiracies; the parties are all maskers, who have taken
mutual oaths of silence not to betray each other's secret and
each to keep the other's madness in countenance. You can scarce
drive any craft here that does not seem a subornation of the
treason. I believe in the spade and an acre of good ground.
Whoso cuts a straight path to his own bread, by the help of God
in the sun and rain and sprouting of the grain, seems to me an
_universal_ workman. He solves the problem of life, not for one,
but for all men of sound body. I wish I may one day send you
word, or, better, show you the fact, that I live by my hands
without loss of memory or of hope. And yet I am of such a puny
constitution, as far as concerns bodily labor, that perhaps I
never shall. We will see.
Did I tell you that we hope shortly to send you some American
verses and prose of good intent? My vivacious friend Margaret
Fuller is to edit a journal whose first number she promises for
the 1st of July next, which I think will be written with a good
will if written at all. I saw some poetical fragments which
charmed me,--if only the writer consents to give them to
the public.
I believe I have yet little to tell you of myself. I ended in
the middle of February my ten lectures on the Present Age. They
are attended by four hundred and fifty to five hundred people,
and the young people are so attentive; and out of the hall ask
me so many questions, that I assume all the airs of Age and
Sapience. I am very happy in the sympathy and society of from
six to a dozen persons, who teach me to hope and expect
everything from my countrymen. We shall have many Richmonds in
the field presently. I turn my face homeward to-morrow, and this
summer I mean to resume my endeavor to make some presentable book
of Essays out of my mountain of manuscript, were it only for the
sake of clearance. I left my wife, and boy, and girl,--the
softest, gracefulest little maiden alive, creeping like a turtle
with head erect all about the house,--well at home a week ago.
The boy has two deep blue wells for eyes, into which I gladly
peer when I am tired. Ellen, they say, has no such depth of orb,
but I believe I love her better than ever I did the boy. I
brought my mother with me here to spend the summer with William
Emerson and his wife and ruddy boy of four years. All these
persons love and honour you in proportion to their knowledge
and years.
My letter will find you, I suppose, meditating new lectures for
your London disciples. May love and truth inspire them! I can
see easily that my predictions are coming to pass, and that.
having waited until your Fame wag in the floodtide, we shall not
now see you at all on western shores. Our saintly Dr. T---, I am
told, had a letter within a year from Lord Byron's daughter,
_informing_ the good man of the appearance of a certain wonderful
genius in London named Thomas Carlyle, and all his astonishing
workings on her own and her friends' brains, and him the very
monster whom the Doctor had been honoring with his best dread and
consternation these five years. But do come in one of Mr.
Cunard's ships as soon as the booksellers have made you rich. If
they fail to do so, come and read lectures which the Yankees will
pay for. Give my love and hope and perpetual remembrance to your
wife, and my wife's also, who bears her in her kindest heart, and
who resolves every now and then to write to her, that she may
thank her for the beautiful Guido.
You told me to send you no more accounts. But I certainly shall,
as our financial relations are grown more complex, and I wish at
least to relieve myself of this unwonted burden of booksellers'
accounts and long delays, by sharing them. I have had one of
their estimates by me a year, waiting to send. Farewell.
--R.W.E.
LII. Carlyle to Emerson
Chelsea, London, 1 April, 1840
My Dear Emerson,--A Letter has been due to you from me, if not by
palpable law of reciprocity, yet by other law and right, for some
week or two. I meant to write, so soon as Fraser and I had got a
settlement effected. The traveling Sumner being about to return
into your neighborhood, I gladly accept his offer to take a
message to you. I wish I had anything beyond a dull Letter to
send! But unless, as my Wife suggests, I go and get you a
D'Orsay _Portrait_ of myself, I see not what there is! Do you
read German or not? I now and then fall in with a curious German
volume, not perhaps so easily accessible in the Western world.
Tell me. Or do you ever mean to learn it? I decidedly wish you
would.--As to the D'Orsay Portrait, it is a real curiosity:
Count D'Orsay the emperor of European Dandies portraying the
Prophet of spiritual Sansculottism! He came rolling down hither
one day, many months ago, in his sun-chariot, to the bedazzlement
of all bystanders; found me in dusty gray-plaid dressing-gown,
grim as the spirit of Presbyterianism (my Wife said), and
contrived to get along well enough with me. I found him a man
worth talking to, once and away; a man of decided natural gifts;
every utterance of his containing in it a wild caricature
_likeness_ of some object or other; a dashing man, who might,
some twenty years sooner born, have become one of Bonaparte's
Marshals, and _is,_ alas,--Count D'Orsay! The Portrait he dashed
off in some twenty minutes (I was dining there, to meet Landor);
we have not chanced to meet together since, and I refuse to
undergo any more eight-o'clock dinners for such an object.--Now
if I do not send you the Portrait, after all?
Fraser's account of the _Miscellanies_ stood legibly extended
over large spaces of paper, and was in several senses amazing to
look upon. I trouble _you_ only with the result. Two Hundred
and forty-eight copies (for there were some one or two
"imperfect"): all these he had sold, at two guineas each; and
sold swiftly, for I recollect in December, or perhaps November,
he told me he was "holding back," not to run entirely out. Well,
of the L500 and odd so realized for these Books, the portion that
belonged to me was L239,--the L261 had been the expense of
handing the ware to Emerson over the counter, and drawing in
the coin for it! "Rules of the Trade";--it is a Trade, one would
surmise, in which the Devil has a large interest. However,--not
to spend an instant polluting one's eyesight with that side of
it,--let me feel joyfully, with thanks to Heaven and America,
that I do receive such a sum in the shape of wages, by decidedly
the noblest method in which wages could come to a man. Without
Friendship, without Ralph Waldo Emerson, there had been no
sixpence of that money here. Thanks, and again thanks. This
earth is not an unmingled ball of Mud, after all. Sunbeams
visit it;--mud _and_ sunbeams are the stuff it has from of old
consisted of.--I hasten away from the Ledger, with the mere good-
news that James is altogether content with the "progress" of all
these Books, including even the well-abused _Chartism_ Book. We
are just on the point of finishing our English reprint of the
_Miscellanies;_ of which I hope to send you a copy before long.
And now why do not _you_ write to me? Your Lectures must be done
long ago. Or are you perhaps writing a Book? I shall be right
glad to hear of that; and withal to hear that you do not hurry
yourself, but strive with deliberate energy to produce what in
you is best. Certainly, I think, a right Book does lie in the
man! It is to be remembered also always that the true value is
determined by what we _do not_ write! There is nothing truer
than that now all but forgotten truth; it is eternally true. He
whom it concerns can consider it.--You have doubtless seen
Milnes's review of you. I know not that you will find it to
strike direct upon the secret of _Emerson,_ to hit the nail on
the head, anywhere at all; I rather think not. But it is
gently, not unlovingly done;--and lays the first plank of a kind
of pulpit for you here and throughout all Saxondom: a thing
rather to be thankful for. It on the whole surpassed my
expectations. Milnes tells me he is sending you a copy and a
Note, by Sumner. He is really a pretty little robin-redbreast of
a man.
You asked me about Landor and Heraud. Before my paper entirely
vanish, let me put down a word about them. Heraud is a
loquacious scribacious little man, of middle age, of parboiled
greasy aspect, whom Leigh Hunt describes as "wavering in the most
astonishing manner between being Something and Nothing." To me
he is chiefly remarkable as being still--with his entirely
enormous vanity and very small stock of faculty--out of Bedlam.
He picked up a notion or two from Coleridge many years ago; and
has ever since been rattling them in his head, like peas in an
empty bladder, and calling on the world to "List the Music of the
spheres." He escapes _assassination,_ as I calculate, chiefly by
being the cheerfulest best-natured little creature extant.--You
cannot kill him he laughs so softly, even when he is like killing
you. John Mill said, "I forgive him freely for interpreting the
Universe, now when I find he cannot pronounce the _h's!_" Really
this is no caricature; you have not seen the match of Heraud in
your days. I mentioned to him once that Novalis had said, "The
highest problem of Authorship is the writing of a Bible."--
"That is precisely what I am doing!" answered the aspiring,
unaspirating.*--Of Landor I have not got much benefit either. We
met first, some four years ago, on Cheyne Walk here: a tall,
broad, burly man, with gray hair, and large, fierce-rolling eyes;
of the most restless, impetuous vivacity, not to be held in by
the most perfect breeding,--expressing itself in high-colored
superlatives, indeed in reckless exaggeration, now and then in a
dry sharp laugh not of sport but of mockery; a wild man, whom no
extent of culture had been able to tame! His intellectual
faculty seemed to me to be weak in proportion to his violence of
temper: the judgment he gives about anything is more apt to be
wrong than right,--as the inward whirlwind shows him this side or
the other of the object; and _sides_ of an object are all that
he sees. He is not an original man; in most cases one but sighs
over the spectacle of common place torn to rags. I find him
painful as a writer; like a soul ever promising to take wing
into the Aether, yet never doing it, ever splashing webfooted in
the terrene mud, and only splashing the worse the more he
strives! Two new tragedies of his that I read lately are the
fatalest stuff I have seen for long: not an ingot; ah no, a
distracted coil of wire-drawings salable in no market. Poor
Landor has left his Wife (who is said to be a fool) in Italy,
with his children, who would not quit her; but it seems he has
honestly surrendered all his money to her, except a bare annuity
for furnished lodgings; and now lives at Bath, a solitary
sexagenarian, in that manner. He visits London in May; but says
always it would kill him soon: alas, I can well believe that!
They say he has a kind heart; nor does it seem unlikely: a
perfectly honest heart, free and fearless, dwelling amid such
hallucinations, excitations, tempestuous confusions, I can see he
has. Enough of him! Me he likes well enough, more thanks to
him; but two hours of such speech as his leave me giddy and
undone. I have seen some other Lions, and Lion's-_providers;_
but consider them a worthless species.--When will you write,
then? Consider my frightful outlook with a Course of Lectures to
give "On Heroes and Hero-worship,"--from Odin to Robert Burns!
My Wife salutes you all. Good be in the Concord Household!
Yours ever,
T. Carlyle
--------
* There is an account of Heraud by an admirer in the _Dial_ for
October, 1842, p. 241. It contrasts curiously and instructively
with Carlyle's sketch.
--------
LIII. Emerson to Carlyle
Concord, 21 April, 1840
My Dear Friend,--Three weeks ago I received a letter from you
following another in the week before, which I should have
immediately acknowledged but that I was promised a private
opportunity for the 25th of April, by which time I promised
myself to send you sheets of accounts. I had also written you
from New York about the middle of March. But now I suppose Mr.
Grinnell--a hospitable, humane, modest gentleman in Providence,
R.I., a merchant, much beloved by all his townspeople, and,
though no scholar, yet very fond of silently listening to such--
is packing his trunk to go to England. He offered to carry any
letters for me, and as at his house during my visit to Providence
I was eagerly catechised by all comers concerning Thomas Carlyle,
I thought it behoved me to offer him for his brethren, sisters,
and companions' sake, the joy of seeing the living face of that
wonderful man. Let him see thy face and pass on his way. I who
cannot see it, nor hear the voice that comes forth of it, must
even betake me to this paper to repay the best I can the love of
the Scottish man, and in the hope to deserve more.
Your letter announces _Wilhelm Meister,_ Sterling's _Poems,_ and
_Chartism._ I am very rich, or am to be. But Kennet is no
Mercury. _Wilhelm_ and _Sterling_ have not yet made their
appearance, though diligently inquired after by Stearns Wheeler
and me. Little and Brown now correspond with Longman, not with
Kennet. But they will come soon, perhaps are already arrived.
_Chartism_ arrived at Concord by mail not until one of the last
days of March, though dated by you, I think, the 21st of
December. I returned home on the 3d of April, and found it
waiting. All that is therein said is well and strongly said, and
as the words are barbed and feathered the memory of men cannot
choose but carry them whithersoever men go. And yet I thought
the book itself instructed me to look for more. We seemed to
have a right to an answer less concise to a question so grave and
humane, and put with energy and eloquence. I mean that whatever
probabilities or possibilities of solution occurred should have
been opened to us in some detail. But now it stands as a
preliminary word, and you will one day, when the fact itself is
riper; write the Second Lesson; or those whom you have
influenced will. I read the book twice hastily through, and sent
it directly to press, fearing to be forestalled, for the London
book was in Boston already. Little and Brown are to print it.
Their estimate is:--
Printing page for page with copy ....... $63.35
Paper .....................................44.00
Binding .................................. 90.00
Total .................................... $197.35
Costing say twenty cents per copy for one thousand copies bound.
The book to sell for fifty cents: the Bookseller's commission
twenty percent on the Retail price. The author's profit fifteen
cents per copy. They intend, if a cheap edition is published,--
no unlikely event,--to stitch the book as pamphlet, and sell it
at thirty-eight cents. I expect it from the press in a few days.
I shall not on this sheet break into the other accounts, as I am
expecting hourly from Munroe's clerk an entire account of
R.W.E. with T.C., of which I have furnished him with all the
facts I had, and he is to write it out in the manner of his
craft. I did not give it to him until I had made some unsuccessful
experiments myself.
I am here at work now for a fortnight to spin some single cord
out of my thousand and one strands of every color and texture
that lie raveled around me in old snarls. We need to be
possessed with a mountainous conviction of the value of our
advice to our contemporaries, if we will take such pains to find
what that is. But no, it is the pleasure of the spinning that
betrays poor spinners into the loss of so much good time. I
shall work with the more diligence on this book to-be of mine,
that you inform me again and again that my penny tracts are still
extant; nay, that, beside friendly men, learned and poetic men
read and even review them. I am like Scholasticus of the Greek
Primer, who was ashamed to bring out so small a dead child before
such grand people. Pygmalion shall try if he cannot fashion a
better, certainly a bigger.--I am sad to hear that Sterling sails
again for his health. I am ungrateful not to have written to
him, as his letter was very welcome to me. I will not promise
again until I do it. I received a note last week forwarded by
Mr. Hume from New York, and instantly replied to greet the good
messenger to our Babylonian city, and sent him letters to a few
friends of mine there. But my brother writes me that he had left
New York for Washington when he went to seek him at his lodgings.
I hope he will come northward presently, and let us see his face.
_22 April._--Last evening came true the promised account drawn up
by Munroe's clerk, Chapman. I have studied it with more zeal
than success. An account seems an ingenious way of burying
facts: it asks wit equal to his who hid them to find them. I am
far as yet from being master of this statement, yet, as I have
promised it so long, I will send it now, and study a copy of it
at my leisure. It is intended to begin where the last account I
sent you, viz. of _French Revolution,_ ended, with a balance of
$9.53 in your favor.... I send you also a paper which Munroe drew
up a long time ago by way of satisfying me that, so far as the
first and second volumes [of the _Miscellanies_] were concerned,
the result had accorded with the promise that you should have
$1,000 profit from the edition. We prosper marvelously on paper,
but the realized benefit loiters. Will you now set some friend
of yours in Fraser's shop at work on this paper, and see if this
statement is true and transparent. I trust the Munroe firm,--
chiefly Nichols, the clerical partner,--and yet it is a duty to
understand one's own affair. When I ask, at each six months'
reckoning, why we should always be in debt to them, they still
remind me of new and newer printing, and promise correspondent
profits at last. By sending you this account I make it entirely
an affair between you and them. You will have all the facts
which any of us know. I am only concerned as having advanced the
sums which are charged in the account for the payment of paper
and printing, and which promise to liquidate themselves soon, for
Munroe declares he shall have $550 to pay me in a few days. For
the benefit of all parties bid your clerk sift them. One word
more and I have done with this matter, which shall not be weary
if it comes to good,--the account of the London five hundred
_French Revolution_ is not yet six months old, and so does not
come in. Neither does that of the second edition of the first
and second volumes of the _Miscellanies,_ for the same reason.
They will come in due time. I have very good hope that my friend
Margaret Fuller's Journal--after many false baptisms now saying
it will be called _The Dial,_ and which is to appear in July--
will give you a better knowledge of our young people than any you
have had. I will see that it goes to you when the sun first
shines on its face. You asked me if I read German, and I forget
if I have answered. I have contrived to read almost every volume
of Goethe, and I have fifty-five, but I have read nothing else:
but I have not now looked even into Goethe for a long time.
There is no great need that I should discourse to you on books,
least of all on _his_ books; but in a lecture on Literature, in
my course last winter, I blurted all my nonsense on that subject,
and who knows but Margaret Fuller may be glad to print it and
send it to you? I know not.
A Bronson Alcott, who is a great man if he cannot write well, has
come to Concord with his wife and three children and taken a
cottage and an acre of ground to get his living by the help of
God and his own spade. I see that some of the Education people
in England have a school called "Alcott House" after my friend.
At home here he is despised and rejected of men as much as was
ever Pestalozzi. But the creature thinks and talks, and I am
glad and proud of my neighbor. He is interested more than need
is in the Editor Heraud. So do not fail to tell me of him. Of
Landor I would gladly know your knowledge. And now I think I
will release your eyes.
Yours always,
R.W. Emerson
LIV. Emerson to Carlyle
Concord, 30 June, 1840
My Dear Carlyle,--Since I wrote a couple of letters to you,--I
know not exactly when, but in near succession many weeks ago,--
there has come to me _Wilhelm Meister_ in three volumes, goodly
