LXXXIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 29 April, 1843

My Dear Carlyle,--It is a pleasure to set your name once more at
the head of a sheet. It signifies how much gladness, how much
wealth of being, that the good, wise, man-cheering, man-helping
friend, though unseen, lives there yonder, just out of sight.
Your star burns there just below our eastern horizon, and fills
the lower and upper air with splendid and splendescent auroras.
By some refraction which new lenses or else steamships shall
operate, shall I not yet one day see again the disk of benign
Phosphorus? It is a solid joy to me, that whilst you work for
all, you work for me and with me, even if I have little to write,
and seldom write your name.

Since I last wrote to you, I found it needful, if only for the
household's sake, to set some new lectures in order, and go to
new congregations of men. I live so much alone, shrinking almost
cowardly from the contact of worldly and public men, that I need
more than others to quit home sometimes, and roll with the river
of travelers, and live in hotels. I went to Baltimore, where I
had an invitation, and read two lectures on New England. On my
return, I stopped at Philadelphia, and, my Course being now grown
to four lectures, read them there. At New York, my snowball was
larger, and I read five lectures on New England. 1. Religion;
2. Trade; 3. Genius, Manners and Customs; 4. Recent literary
and spiritual influences from abroad; 5. Domestic spiritual
history.--Perhaps I have not quite done with them yet, but may
make them the block of a new and somewhat larger structure for
Boston, next winter. The newspaper reports of them in New York
were such offensive misstatements, that I could not send you, as
I wished, a sketch. Between my two speeches at Baltimore, I went
to Washington, thirty-seven miles, and spent four days. The two
poles of an enormous political battery, galvanic coil on coil,
self-increased by series on series of plates from Mexico to
Canada, and from the sea westward to the Rocky Mountains, here
meet and play, and make the air electric and violent. Yet one
feels how little, more than how much, man is represented there.
I think, in the higher societies of the Universe, it will turn
out that the angels are molecules, as the devils were always
Titans, since the dulness of the world needs such mountainous
demonstration, and the virtue is so modest and concentrating.

But I must not del