Dear Emerson,--The sight of your handwriting was a real blessing
to me, after so long an abstinence. You shall not know all the
sad reflections I have made upon your silence within the last
year. I never doubted your fidelity of heart; your genial deep
and friendly recognition of my bits of merits, and my bits of
sufferings, difficulties and obstructions; your forgiveness of
my faults; or in fact that you ever would forget me, or cease to
think kindly of me: but it seemed as if practically _Old Age_
had come upon the scene here too; and as if upon the whole one
must make up one's mind to know that all this likewise had fallen
silent, and could be possessed henceforth only on those new
terms. Alas, there goes much over, year after year, into the
regions of the Immortals; inexpressibly beautiful, but also
inexpressibly sad. I have not many voices to commune with in the
world. In fact I have properly no voice at all; and yours, I
have often said, was the _unique_ among my fellow-creatures, from
which came full response, and discourse of reason: the
_solitude_ one lives in, if one has any spiritual thought at all,
is very great in these epochs!--The truth is, moreover, I bought
spectacles to myself about two years ago (bad print in candle-
light having fairly become troublesome to me); much may lie in
that! "The buying of your first pair of spectacles," I said to
an old Scotch gentleman, "is an important epoch; like the buying
of your first razor."--"Yes," answered he, "but not quite so
joyful perhaps!"--Well, well, I have heard from you again; and
you promise to be again constant in writing. Shall I believe
you, this time? Do it, and shame the Devil! I really am
persuaded it will do yourself good; and to me I know right well,
and have always known, what it will do. The gaunt lonesomeness
of this Midnight Hour, in the ugly universal _snoring_ hum of the
overfilled deep-sunk Posterity of Adam, renders an articulate
speaker precious indeed! Watchman, what sayest thou, then?
Watchman, what of the night?--
Your glimpses of the huge unmanageable Mississippi, of the huge
ditto Model Republic, have here and there something of the _epic_
in them,--_ganz nach meinem Sinne._ I see you do not dissent
from me in regard to that latter enormous Phenomenon, except on
the outer surface, and in the way of peaceably instead of
_un_peaceably accepting the same. Alas, all the world is a
"republic of the Mediocrities," and always was;--you may see what
_its_ "universal suffrage" is and has been, by looking into all
the ugly mud-ocean (with some old weathercocks atop) that now
_is:_ the world wholly (if we think of it) is the exact stamp of
men wholly, and of the _sincerest_ heart-tongue-and-hand
"suffrage" they could give about it, poor devils!--I was much
struck with Plato, last year, and his notions about Democracy:
mere Latter-Day Pamphlet _saxa et faces_ (read _faeces,_ if you
like) refined into empyrean radiance and lightning of the gods!--
I, for my own part, perceive the use of all this too, the
inevitability of all this; but perceive it (at the present
height it has attained) to be disastrous withal, to be horrible
and even damnable. That Judas Iscariot should come and slap
Jesus Christ on the shoulder in a familiar manner; that all
heavenliest nobleness should be flung out into the muddy streets
there to jostle elbows with all thickest-skinned denizens of
chaos, and get itself at every turn trampled into the gutters and
annihilated:--alas, the _reverse_ of all this was, is, and ever
will be, the strenuous effort and most solemn heart-purpose of
every good citizen in every country of the world,--and will
_reappear_ conspicuously as such (in New England and in Old,
first of all, as I calculate), when once this malodorous
melancholy "Uncle Tommery" is got all well put by! Which will
take some time yet, I think.--And so we will leave it.
I went to Germany last autumn; not _seeking_ anything very
definite; rather merely flying from certain troops of
carpenters, painters, bricklayers, &c., &c., who had made a
lodgment in this poor house; and have not even yet got their
incalculable riot quite concluded. Sorrow on them,--and no
return to these poor premises of mine till I have quite left!--In
Germany I found but little; and suffered, from six weeks of
sleeplessness in German beds, &c., &c., a great deal. Indeed I
seem to myself never yet to have quite recovered. The Rhine
which I honestly ascended from Rotterdam to Frankfort was, as I
now find, my chief Conquest the beautifulest river in the Earth,
I do believe; and my first idea of a World-river. It is many
fathoms deep, broader twice over than the Thames here at high
water; and rolls along, mirror-smooth (except that, in looking
close, you will find ten thousand little eddies in it),
voiceless, swift, with trim banks, through the heart of Europe,
and of the Middle Ages wedded to the Present Age: such an image
of calm _power_ (to say nothing of its other properties) I find I
had never seen before. The old Cities too are a little beautiful
to me, in spite of my state of nerves; honest, kindly people
too, but sadly short of our and your _despatch-of-business_
talents,--a really painful defect in the long run. I was on two
of Fritz's Battle-fields, moreover: Lobositz in Bohemia, and
Kunersdorf by Frankfurt on the Oder; but did not, especially in
the latter case, make much of that. Schiller's death-chamber,
Goethe's sad Court-environment; above all, Luther's little room
in the _Wartburg_ (I believe I actually had tears in my eyes
there, and kissed the old oak-table, being in a very flurried
state of nerves), my belief was that under the Canopy there was
not at present so _holy_ a spot as that same. Of human souls I
found none specially beautiful to me at all, at all,--such my sad
fate! Of learned professors, I saw little, and that little was
more than enough. Tieck at Berlin, an old man, lame on a Sofa, I
did love, and do; he is an exception, could I have seen much of
him. But on the whole _Universal Puseyism_ seemed to me the
humor of German, especially of Berlin thinkers;--and I had some
quite portentous specimens of that kind,--unconscious specimens
of four hundred quack power! Truly and really the Prussian
Soldiers, with their intelligent _silence,_ with the touches of
effective Spartanism I saw or fancied in them, were the class of
people that pleased me best. But see, my sheet is out! I am
still reading, reading, most nightmare Books about Fritz; but as
to writing,--_Ach Gott!_ Never, never.--Clough is coming home, I
hope.--Write soon, if you be not enchanted!
Yours ever,
T. Carlyle