It is thirty-three years in July, I believe, since I first saw her, and her conversation and faultless manners gave assurance of a good and happy future. As I have not witnessed any decline, I can hardly believe in any, and still recall vividly the youthful wife, and her blithe account of her letters and homages from Goethe, and the details she gave of her intended visit to Weimar, and its disappointment. Her goodness to me and to my friends was ever perfect, and all Americans have agreed in her praise. Elizabeth Hoar remembers her with entire sympathy and regard.
I could heartily wish to see you for an hour in these lonely days. Your friends, I know, will approach you as tenderly as friends can; and I can believe that labor—all whose precious secrets you know—will prove a consoler,—though it cannot quite avail, for she was the rest that rewarded labor. It is good that you are strong, and built for endurance. Nor will you shun to consult the awful oracles which in these hours of tenderness are sometimes vouchsafed. If to any, to you.
I rejoice that she stayed to enjoy the knowledge of your good day at Edinburgh, which is a leaf we would not spare from your book of life. It was a right manly speech to be so made, and is a voucher of unbroken strength,—and the surroundings, as I learn, were all the happiest,—with no hint of change.
I pray you bear in mind your own counsels. Long years you must still achieve, and, I hope, neither grief nor weariness will let you "join the dim choir of the bards that have been," until you have written the book I wish and wait for,—the sincerest confessions of your best hours.
My wife prays to be remembered to you with sympathy and affection.
Ever yours faithfully,
R.W. Emerson
CLXXV. Carlyle to Emerson
Mentone, France, Alpes Maritimes 27 January, 1867
My Dear Emerson,—It is along time since I last wrote to you; and a long distance in space and in fortune,—from the shores of the Solway in summer 1865, to this niche of the Alps and Mediterranean today, after what has befallen me in the interim. A longer interval, I think, and surely by far a sadder, than ever occurred between us before, since we first met in the Scotch moors, some five and thirty years ago. You have written me various Notes, too, and Letters, all good and cheering to me,— almost the only truly human speech I have heard from anybody living;—and still my stony silence could not be broken; not till now, though often looking forward to it, could I resolve on such a thing. You will think me far gone, and much bankrupt in hope and heart;—and indeed I am; as good as without hope and without fear; a gloomily serious, silent, and sad old man; gazing into the final chasm of things, in mute dialogue with "Death, Judgment, and Eternity" (dialogue mute on both sides!), not caring to discourse with poor articulate-speaking fellow creatures on their sorts of topics. It is right of me; and yet also it is not right. I often feel that I had better be dead than thus indifferent, contemptuous, disgusted with the world and its roaring nonsense, which I have no thought farther of lifting a finger to help, and only try to keep out of the way of, and shut my door against. But the truth is, I was nearly killed by that hideous Book on Friedrich,—twelve years in continuous wrestle with the nightmares and the subterranean hydras;—nearly killed, and had often thought I should be altogether, and must die leaving the monster not so much as finished! This is one truth, not so evident to any friend or onlooker as it is to myself: and then there is another, known to myself alone, as it were; and of which I am best not to speak to others, or to speak to them no farther. By the calamity of April last, I lost my little all in this world; and have no soul left who can make any corner of this world into a home for me any more. Bright, heroic, tender, true and noble was that lost treasure of my heart, who faithfully accompanied me in all the rocky ways and climbings; and I am forever poor without her. She was snatched from me in a moment,—as by a death from the gods. Very beautiful her death was; radiantly beautiful (to those who understand it) had all her life been quid plura? I should be among the dullest and stupidest, if I were not among the saddest of all men. But not a word more on all this.
All summer last, my one solacement in the form of work was writing, and sorting of old documents and recollections; summoning out again into clearness old scenes that had now closed on me without return. Sad, and in a sense sacred; it was like a kind of worship; the only devout time I had had for a great while past. These things I have half or wholly the intention to burn out of the way before I myself die:—but such continues still mainly my employment,—so many hours every forenoon; what I call the "work" of my day;—to me, if to no other, it is useful; to reduce matters to writing means that you shall know them, see them in their origins and sequences, in their essential lineaments, considerably better than you ever did before. To set about writing my own Life would be no less than horrible to me; and shall of a certainty never be done. The common impious vulgar of this earth, what has it to do with my life or me? Let dignified oblivion, silence, and the vacant azure of Eternity swallow me; for my share of it, that, verily, is the handsomest, or one handsome way, of settling my poor account with the canaille of mankind extant and to come. "Immortal glory," is not that a beautiful thing, in the Shakespeare Clubs and Literary Gazettes of our improved Epoch?—I did not leave London, except for fourteen days in August, to a fine and high old Lady- friend's in Kent; where, riding about the woods and by the sea- beaches and chalk cliffs, in utter silence, I felt sadder than ever, though a little less miserably so, than in the intrusive babblements of London, which I could not quite lock out of doors. We read, at first, Tennyson's Idyls, with profound recognition of the finely elaborated execution, and also of the inward perfection of vacancy,—and, to say truth, with considerable impatience at being treated so very like infants, though the lollipops were so superlative. We gladly changed for one Emerson's English Traits; and read that, with increasing and ever increasing satisfaction every evening; blessing Heaven that there were still Books for grown-up people too! That truly is a Book all full of thoughts like winged arrows (thanks to the Bowyer from us both):—my Lady-friend's name is Miss Davenport Bromley; it was at Wooton, in her Grandfather's House, in Staffordshire, that Rousseau took shelter in 1760; and one hundred and six years later she was reading Emerson to me with a recognition that would have pleased the man, had he seen it.