ed
seemingly pretty near the point when all criticism and proclamation
in matters literary has degenerated into an inane jargon, incredible,
unintelligible, inarticulate as the cawing of choughs and rooks; and
many things in that as in other provinces, are in a state of painful
and rapid transition. A good book has no way of recommending itself
except slowly and as it were accidentally from hand to hand. The man
that wrote it must abide his time. He needs, as indeed all men do, the
_faith_ that this world is built not on falsehood and jargon but on
truth and reason; that no good thing done by any creature of God was,
is, or ever can be _lost_, but will verily do the service appointed
for it, and be found among the general sum-total and all of things
after long times, nay after all time, and through eternity itself. Let
him 'cast his bread upon the waters,' therefore, cheerful of heart;
'he will find it after many days.'

"I know not why I write all this to you; it comes very spontaneously
from me. Let it be your satisfaction, the highest a man can have in
this world, that the talent entrusted to you did not lie useless,
but was turned to account, and proved itself to be a talent; and the
'publishing world' can receive it altogether according to their own
pleasure, raise it high on the housetops, or trample it low into the
street-kennels; that is not the question at all, the _thing_ remains
precisely what it was after never such raising and never such
depressing and trampling, there is no change whatever in _it_. I bid
you go on, and prosper.

"One thing grieves me: the tone of sadness, I might say of settled
melancholy that runs through all your utterances of yourself. It is
not right, it is wrong; and yet how shall I reprove you? If you knew
me, you would triumphantly[A] for any spiritual endowment bestowed
on a man, that it is accompanied, or one might say _preceded_ as the
first origin of it, always by a delicacy of organisation which in
a world like ours is sure to have itself manifoldly afflicted,
tormented, darkened down into sorrow and disease. You feel yourself an
exile, in the East; but in the West too it is exile; I know not where
under the sun it is not exile. Here in the Fog Babylon, amid mud
and smoke, in the infinite din of 'vociferous platitude,' and quack
outbellowing quack, with truth and pity on all hands ground under the
wheels, can one call it a home, or a world? It is a waste chaos, where
we have