My Dear Carlyle,--I have two good letters from you, and until now
you have had no acknowledgment. Especially I ought to have told
you how much pleasure your noble invitation in March gave me.
This pleasing dream of going to England dances before me
sometimes. It would be, I then fancy, that stimulation which my
capricious, languid, and languescent study needs. At home, no
man makes any proper demand on me, and the audience I address is
a handful of men and women too widely scattered than that they
can dictate to me that which they are justly entitled to say.
Whether supercilious or respectful, they do not say anything that
can be heard. Of course, I have only myself to please, and my
work is slighted as soon as it has lost its first attraction. It
is to be hoped, if one should cross the sea, that the terror of
your English culture would scare the most desultory of Yankees
into precision and fidelity; and perhaps I am not yet too old to
be animated by what would have seemed to my youth a proud
privilege. If you shall fright me into labor and concentration,
I shall win my game; for I can well afford to pay any price to
get my work well done. For the rest, I hesitate, of course, to
rush rudely on persons that have been so long invisible angels to
me. No reasonable man but must hold these bounds in awe:--I--
much more,--who am of a solitary habit, from my childhood until
now.--I hear nothing again from Mr. Ireland. So I will let the
English Voyage hang as an afternoon rainbow in the East, and mind
my apples and pears for the present.
You are to know that in these days I lay out a patch of orchard
near my house, very much to the improvement, as all the household
affirm, of our homestead. Though I have little skill in these
things, and must borrow that of my neighbors, yet the works of
the garden and orchard at this season are fascinating, and will
eat up days and weeks, and a brave scholar should shun it like
gambling, and take refuge in cities and hotels from these
pernicious enchantments. For the present, I stay in the
new orchard.
Duyckinck, a literary man in New York, who advises Wiley and
Putnam in their publishing enterprises, wrote me lately, that
they had $600 for you, from _Cromwell._ So may it be.
Yours,
R.W.E.