My Dear Carlyle,--I see no way for you to avoid the Americans but
to come to America. For, first or last, we are all embarking,
and all steering straight to your door. Mr. and Mrs. Joseph
Longworth of Cincinnati are going abroad on their travels.
Possibly, the name is not quite unknown to you. Their father,
Nicholas Longworth, is one of the founders of the city of
Cincinnati, a bigger town than Boston, where he is a huge land
lord and planter, and patron of sculptors and painters. And his
family are most favorably known to all dwellers and strangers, in
the Ohio Valley, as people who have well used their great wealth.
His chief merit is to have introduced a systematic culture of the
wine-grape and wine manufacture, by the importing and settlement
of German planters in that region, and the trade is thriving to
the general benefit. His son Joseph is a well-bred gentleman of
literary tastes, whose position and good heart make him largely
hospitable. His wife is a very attractive and excellent woman,
and they are good friends of mine. It seems I have at some
former time told her that, when she went to England, she should
see you. And they are going abroad, soon, for the first time.
If you are in London, you must be seen of them.
But I hailed even this need of taxing once more your often taxed
courtesy, as a means to break up my long contumacy to-you-ward.
Please let not the wires be rusted out, so that we cannot weld
them again, and let me feel the subtle fluid streaming strong.
Tell me what is become of _Frederic,_ for whose appearance I have
watched every week for months? I am better ready for him, since
one or two books about Voltaire, Maupertuis, and company, fell in
my way.
Yet that book will not come which I most wish to read, namely,
the culled results, the quintessence of private conviction, a
_liber veritatis,_ a few sentences, hints of the final moral you
drew from so much penetrating inquest into past and present men.
All writing is necessitated to be exoteric, and written to a
human should instead of to the terrible is. And I say this to
you, because you are the truest and bravest of writers. Every
writer is a skater, who must go partly where he would, and
partly, where the skates carry him; or a sailor, who can only
land where sails can be safely blown. The variations to be
allowed for in the surveyor's compass are nothing like so large
as those that must be allowed for in every book. And a
friendship of old gentlemen who have got rid of many illusions,
survived their ambition, and blushes, and passion for euphony,
and surface harmonies, and tenderness for their accidental
literary stores, but have kept all their curiosity and awe
touching the problems of man and fate and the Cause of causes,--a
friendship of old gentlemen of this fortune is looking more
comely and profitable than anything I have read of love. Such a
dream flatters my incapacities for conversation, for we can all
play at monosyllables, who cannot attempt the gay pictorial
panoramic styles.
So, if ever I hear that you have betrayed the first symptom of
age, that your back is bent a twentieth of an inch from the
perpendicular, I shall hasten to believe you are shearing your
prodigal overgrowths, and are calling in your troops to the
citadel, and I may come in the first steamer to drop in of
evenings and hear the central monosyllables.
Be good now again, and send me quickly--though it be the shortest
autograph certificate of....*
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* The end of this letter is lost.
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