Dear Fitzgerald,
I have been here ever since the day you last heard of me; leading the strangest life of absolute Latrappism; and often enough remembering Farlingay and you. I live perfectly alone, and without speech at all,—there being in fact nobody to speak to, except one austerely punctual housemaid, who does her functions, like an eight-day clock, generally without bidding. My wife comes out now and then to give the requisite directions; but commonly withdraws again on the morrow, leaving the monster to himself and his own ways. I have Books; a complete Edition of Voltaire, [302b] for one Book, in which I read for use, or for idleness oftenest,—getting into endless reflexions over it, mostly of a sad and not very utterable nature. I find V. a ‘gentleman,’ living in a world partly furnished with such; and that there are now almost no ‘gentlemen’ (not quite none): this is one great head of my reflexions, to which there is no visible tail or finish. I have also a Horse (borrowed
from my fat Yeoman friend, who is at sea bathing in Sussex); and I go riding, at great lengths daily, over hill and dale: this I believe is really the main good I am doing,—if in this either there be much good. But it is a strange way of life to me, for the time; perhaps not unprofitable: To let Chaos say out its say, then, and one’s Evil Genius give one the very worst language he has, for a while. It is still to last for a week or more. To day, for the first time, I ride back to Chelsea, but mean to return hither on Monday. There is a great circle of yellow light all the way from Shooter’s Hill to Primrose Hill, spread round my horizon every night, I see it while smoking my pipe before bed (so bright, last night, it cast a visible shadow of me against the white window-shutters); and this is all I have to do with London and its gases for a fortnight or more. My wife writes to me, there was an awful jangle of bells last day she went home from this; a Quaker asked in the railway, of some porter, ‘Can thou tell me what these bells mean?’—‘Well, I suppose something is up. They say Sebastopol is took, and the Rushans run away.’—À la bonne heure: but won’t they come back again, think you?
On the whole I say, when you get your little Suffolk cottage, you must have in it a ‘chamber in the wall’ for me, plus a pony that can trot, and a cow that gives good milk: with these outfits we shall make a pretty rustication now and then, not wholly Latrappish, but only half, on much easier terms than here; and I shall be right willing to come and try it, I for one party.—Meanwhile, I hope the Naseby matter is steadily going ahead; sale completed; and even the monument concern
making way. Tell me a little how that and other matters are. If you are at home, a line is rapidly conveyed hither, steam all the way: after the beginning of the next week, I am at Chelsea, and (I dare say) there is a fire in the evenings now to welcome you there. Shew face in some way or other.
And so adieu; for my hour of riding is at hand.
Yours ever truly,
T. Carlyle.
To E. B. Cowell.
31 Great Portland Street, P. Place.
[1856.]
My dear Cowell,