I should sometimes write to you if I had anything worth telling, or worth
putting you to the trouble of answering me. About twice in a year
however I do not mind asking you one thing which is easily answered, how
you and Mrs. Carlyle are? And yet perhaps it is not so easy for you to
tell me so much about yourself: for your 'well-being' comprises a good
deal! That you are not carried off by the Cholera I take for granted:
since else I should have seen in the papers some controversy with Doctor
Wordsworth as to whether you were to be buried in Westminster Abbey, by
the side of Wilberforce perhaps! Besides, a short note from Thackeray a
few weeks ago told me you had been to see him. I conclude also from this
that you have not been a summer excursion of any distance.
I address from the Rectory (_Vicarage_ it ought to be) of Crabbe, the
'_Radiator_,' whose mind is now greatly exercised with Dr. Whewell's
Plurality of Worlds. Crabbe, who is a good deal in the secrets of
Providence, admires the work beyond measure, but most indignantly rejects
the Doctrine as unworthy of God. I have not read the Book, contented to
hear Crabbe's commentaries. I have been staying with him off and on for
two months, and, as I say, give his Address because any letter thither
directed will find me sooner or later in my little wanderings. I am at
present staying with a Farmer in a very pleasant house near Woodbridge:
inhabiting such a room as even you, I think, would sleep composedly in;
my host a taciturn, cautious, honest, active man whom I have known all my
Life. He and his Wife, a capital housewife, and his Son, who could carry
me on his shoulders to Ipswich, and a Maid servant who, as she curtsies
of a morning, lets fall the Tea-pot, etc., constitute the household.
Farming greatly prospers; farming materials fetching an exorbitant price
at the Michaelmas Auctions: all in defiance of Sir Fitzroy Kelly who got
returned for Suffolk on the strength of denouncing Corn Law Repeal as the
ruin of the Country. He has bought a fine house near Ipswich, with great
gilded gates before it, and by dint of good dinners and soft sawder
finally draws the country Gentry to him. . . .
Please to look at the September Number of Fraser's Magazine where are
some prose Translations of Hafiz by Cowell which may interest you a
little. I think Cowell (as he is apt to do) gives Hafiz rather too much
credit for a mystical wine-cup, and Cupbearer; I mean taking him on the
whole. The few odes he quotes have certainly a deep and pious feeling:
such as the Man of Mirth will feel at times; none perhaps more strongly.
Some one by chance read out to me the other day at the seaside your
account of poor old Naseby Village from Cromwell, quoted in Knight's
'Half Hours, etc.' It is now twelve years ago, at this very season, I
was ransacking for you; you promising to come down, and never coming. I
hope very much you are soon going to give us something: else Jerrold and
Tupper carry all before them.
SATURDAY, _October_ 14/54.
* * * * *
In August 1855 Carlyle went to stay with FitzGerald at Farlingay, a farm
house on the Hasketon road, half a mile from Woodbridge.
BREDFIELD RECTORY, WOODBRIDGE.
_August_ 1, [1855].