My Dear Carlyle,--I received from you through Mr. Chapman, just
before Christmas, the last rich instalment of your Library
Edition; viz. Vols. IV.-X. _Life of Friedrich;_ Vols. L-III.
_Translations from German;_ one volume General Index; eleven
volumes in all,--and now my stately collection is perfect.
Perfect too is your Victory. But I clatter my chains with joy,
as I did forty years ago, at your earliest gifts. Happy man you
should be, to whom the Heaven has allowed such masterly
completion. You shall wear your crown at the Pan-Saxon Games
with no equal or approaching competitor in sight,--well earned by
genius and exhaustive labor, and with nations for your pupils and
praisers. I count it my eminent happiness to have been so nearly
your contemporary, and your friend,--permitted to detect by its
rare light the new star almost before the Easterners had seen it,
and to have found no disappointment, but joyful confirmation
rather, in coming close to its orb. Rest, rest, now for a time;
I pray you, and be thankful. Meantime, I know well all your
perversities, and give them a wide berth. They seriously annoy a
great many worthy readers, nations of readers sometimes,--but I
heap them all as style, and read them as I read Rabelais's
gigantic humors which astonish in order to force attention, and
by and by are seen to be the rhetoric of a highly virtuous
gentleman who _swears._ I have been quite too busy with fast
succeeding _jobs_ (I may well call them), in the last year, to
have read much in these proud books; but I begin to see daylight
coming through my fogs, and I have not lost in the least my
appetite for reading,--resolve, with my old Harvard professor,
"to retire and read the Authors."
I am impatient to deserve your grand Volumes by reading in them
with all the haughty airs that belong to seventy years which I
shall count if I live till May, 1873. Meantime I see well that
you have lost none of your power, and I wish that you would let
in some good Eckermann to dine with you day by day, and competent
to report your opinions,--for you can speak as well as you can
write, and what the world to come should know...
Affectionately,
R.W. Emerson