Dear Emerson,--We are delighted to hear of you again at first
hand: our last traditions represented you at Edinburgh, and left
the prospect of your return hither very vague. I have only time
for one word tonight: to say that your room is standing vacant
ever since you quitted it,--ready to be lighted up with all
manner of physical and moral _fires_ that the place will yield;
and is in fact _your_ room, and expects to be accounted such.--I
know not specially what your operations in this quarter are to
be; but whatever they are, or the arrangements necessary for
them, surely it is here that you must alight again in the big
Babel, and deliberately adjust what farther is to be done.
Write to us what day you are to arrive; and the rest is all
already managed.
Jane has never yet got out since the cold took her; but she has
at no time been so ill as is frequent with her in these winter
disorders; she is now steadily improving, and we expect will
come out with the sun and the green leaves,--as she usually does.
I too caught an ugly cold, and, what is very uncommon with me, a
kind of cough, while down in Hampshire; which, with other
inarticulate matters, has kept me in a very mute abstruse
condition all this while; so that, for many weeks past, I have
properly had no history,--except such as trees in winter, and
other merely passive objects may have. That is not an agreeable
side of the page; but I find it indissolubly attached to the
other: no historical leaf with me but has them _both!_ Reading
does next to nothing for me at present, neither will thinking or
even dreaming rightly prosper; of no province can I be quite
master except of the _silent_ one, in such a case. One feels
there, at last, as if quite annihilated; and takes up arms again
(the poor goose-quill is no great things of a weapon to arm
with!) as if in a kind of sacred despair.
All people are in a sort of joy-dom over the new French Republic,
which has descended suddenly (or shall we say, _ascended_ alas?)
out of the Immensities upon us; showing once again that the
righteous Gods do yet live and reign! It is long years since I
have felt any such deep-seated pious satisfaction at a public
event. Adieu: come soon; and warn us when.
Yours ever,
T. Carlyle