Concerning the "tent-making," there is much more to be said, but am I to adopt your rule and never speak of what I suppose we agree about? It is necessary to me, not simply to be but to utter, and I require utterance of my friends. What is it to me that I think the same thoughts? I think them in a somewhat different fashion. No mind that has any real life is a mere echo of another. If the perfect unison comes occasionally, as in music, it enhances the harmonies. It is like a diffusion or expansion of one's own life to be assured that its vibrations are repeated in another, and words are the media of those vibrations. Is not the universe itself a perpetual utterance of the one Being? So I say again, utter, utter, utter, and it will be a deed of mercy twice blessed, for I shall be a safety-valve for your communicativeness and prevent it from splitting honest people's brains who don't understand you; and, moreover, it will be fraught with ghostly comfort to me.
Letter to J. Sibree, Sunday evening, later in 1848.
I might make a very plausible excuse for not acknowledging your kind note earlier by telling you that I have been both a nurse and invalid; but, to be thoroughly ingenuous, I must confess that all this would not have been enough to prevent my writing but for my chronic disease of utter idleness. I have heard and thought of you with great interest, however. You have my hearty and not inexperienced sympathy; for, to speak in the style of Jonathan Oldbuck, I am haud ignara mali. I have gone through a trial of the same genus as yours, though rather differing in species. I sincerely rejoice in the step you have taken; it is an absolutely necessary condition for any true development of your nature. It was impossible to think of your career with hope, while you tacitly subscribed to the miserable etiquette (it deserves no better or more spiritual name) of sectarianism. Only persevere; be true, firm, and loving; not too anxious about immediate usefulness to others—that can only be a result of justice to yourself. Study mental hygiene. Take long doses of dolce far niente, and be in no great hurry about anything in this 'varsal world! Do we not commit ourselves to sleep, and so resign all care for ourselves every night; lay ourselves gently on the bosom of Nature or God? A beautiful reproach to the spirit of some religionists and ultra good people.
I like the notion of your going to Germany, as good in every way, for yourself, body and mind, and for all others. Oh, the bliss of having a very high attic in a romantic Continental town, such as Geneva, far away from morning callers, dinners, and decencies, and then to pause for a year and think de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis, and then to return to life, and work for poor stricken humanity, and never think of self again![23]
I am writing nearly in the dark, with the post-boy waiting. I fear I shall not be at home when you come home, but surely I shall see you before you leave England. However that may be, I shall utter a genuine Lebewohl.
Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 1st Feb. 1848.
In my view there are but two kinds of regular correspondence possible—one of simple affection, which gives a picture of all the details, painful and pleasurable, that a loving heart pines after, and this we carry on through the medium of Cara; or one purely moral and intellectual, carried on for the sake of ghostly edification, in which each party has to put salt on the tails of all sorts of ideas on all sorts of subjects, in order to send a weekly or fortnightly packet, as so much duty and self-castigation. I have always been given to understand that such Lady-Jane-Grey-like works were your abhorrence. However, let me know what you would like—what would make you continue to hold me in loving remembrance or convince you that you are a bright evergreen in my garden of pleasant plants. Behold me ready to tear off my right hand or pluck out my right eye (metaphorically, of course—I speak to an experienced exegetist, comme dirait notre Strauss), or write reams of letters full of interesting falsehoods or very dull truths. We have always concluded that our correspondence should be of the third possible kind—one of impulse, which is necessarily irregular as the Northern Lights.
Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 14th April, 1848.
I am a miserable wretch, with aching limbs and sinking spirits, but still alive enough to feel the kindness of your last note. I thoroughly enjoyed your delight in Emerson. I should have liked to see you sitting by him "with awful eye," for once in your life feeling all the bliss of veneration. I am quite uncertain about our movements. Dear father gets on very slowly, if at all. You will understand the impossibility of my forming any plans for my own pleasure. Rest is the only thing I can think of with pleasure now.
Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th April, 1848.