Your censure of the conception almost provoked me into publishing, because it showed how washy the world is in its confidences. There is a Roland for your Oliver, my boy. But I probably shan’t publish, for fear of a row with my committee.
To the same.
June 19, 1850.
It continues to strike me how ignorant you, and I, and other young men of our set are. Actual life is unknown to an Oxford student, even though he is not a mere Puseyite, and goes on jolly reading parties.
Enter the arena of your brethren, and go not to your grave without knowing what common merchants and solicitors, much more sailors and coalheavers, are acquainted with. Ignorance is a poor kind of innocence. The world is wiser than the wise, and as innocent as the innocent; and it has long been found out what is the best way of taking things. ‘The earth,’ said the great traveller, ‘is much the same wherever we go’; and the changes of position which women and students tremble and shilly-shally before, leave things much as they found them. Cœlum non animum mutant. The winter comes and destroys all, but in the spring the old grasses come up all the greener.
Let us not sit in a corner and mope, and think ourselves clever, for our comfort, while the room is full of dancing and cheerfulness. The sum of the whole matter is this. Whatsoever your hand findeth to do, do it without fiddle-faddling; for there is no experience, nor pleasure, nor pain, nor instruction, nor anything else in the grave whither thou goest. When you get to the end of this life, you won’t find another ready-made, in which you can do without effort what you were meant to do with effort here.
To R. W. Emerson, Esq.
University Hall, Gordon Square: July 22, 1850.
Why I have let six months pass away without acknowledging the copy of your ‘Representative Men,’ which I received and read so thankfully, I do not know; unless it be that I was not willing to put an end at once to the relation of debtor which resulted. To have a distinct claim on one for a letter constitutes a sort of connection, even with the Atlantic between us.
I am here at the end of my first session in London, not much the worse, nor much the wiser. I am not sorry myself to be where I am: in very many ways, it is a greater seclusion than the academic shades you took pleasure in looking at, at Oxford.