To T. Arnold, Esq.
99 Holywell, Oxford: November 6, 1848.
I have given up the Fellowship, though the Provost still forbears to go through the formal step of officially announcing my resignation; so that I am loose on the world, and, being just out of my old place, I am ready to look at every new place, and likely enough to go to none. Even if literature does look likely, I confess I should like to knock about the world a little bit more before I do much in that way; yea, though I am all but thirty already. I am extremely jolly meantime, rejoicing in my emancipation. I stay up here; it is now three weeks within twenty-four hours since I resigned; and people don’t cut me at all. I dine at some high tables, and generally (retaining my gown, for I don’t wish to volunteer to cast that off) I am treated as a citizen.
I have an invitation to stand for the Headship of the new University Hall (on the Oxford and Cambridge College system) to be attached to University College, London. My poem, ‘The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich,’ in about two thousand hexameters, ‘A Long-Vacation Pastoral,’ has appeared, and has tolerable success in Oxford; but that its local allusions might readily give it.
To his Sister.
December 1848.
It is far nobler to teach people to do what is good because it is good simply, than for the sake of any future reward. It is, I dare say, difficult to keep up an equal religious feeling at present, but it is not impossible, and is necessary. Besides, if we die and come to nothing it does not therefore follow that life and goodness will cease to be in earth and heaven. If we give over dancing, it doesn’t therefore follow that the dance ceases itself, or the music. Be satisfied, that whatever is good in us will be immortal; and as the parent is content to die in the consciousness of the child’s survival, even so, why not we? There’s a creed which will suffice for the present.
A—— belongs, I see, to the new High Churchites, who want to turn all the quiet people adrift; it is the New Plot; but so long as one isn’t obliged to sign articles, or go to daily service, or prayer-meeting, or the like, I don’t see why one should excommunicate oneself. As for the Unitarians, they’re better than the other Dissenters, and that’s all; but to go to their chapels—no!
To R. W. Emerson, Esq.
February 10, 1849.