ife: I understand
he is building himself a brave house, and also busy writing a
poem. He flings too much "sheet-lightning" and unrest into me
when we meet in these low moods of mine; and yet one always
longs for him back again: "No doing with him or without him,"
the dog!

My thrice unfortunate Book on Cromwell,--it is a real descent to
Hades, to Golgotha and Chaos! I feel oftenest as if it were
possibler to die one's self than to bring it into life. Besides,
my health is in general altogether despicable, my "spirits" equal
to those of the ninth part of a dyspeptic tailor! One needs to
be able to go on in all kinds of spirits, in climate sunny or
sunless, or it will never do. The planet Earth, says Voss,--take
four hexameters from Voss:

Journeys this Earth, her eye on a Sun, through the heavenly spaces;
Joyous in radiance, or joyless by fits and swallowed in tempests;
Falters not, alters not, equal advancing, home at the due hour:
So thou, weather-proof, constant, may, equal with day, March!

I have not a moment more tonight;--and besides am inclined to
write unprofitables if I persist. Adieu, my friend; all
blessings be with you always.

Yours ever truly,
T. Carlyle

XC. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 29 February, 1844

My Dear Carlyle,--I received by the last steamer your letter, and
its prefixed order for one hundred and twenty-one dollars, which
order I sent to Ward, who turned it at once into money. Thanks,
dear friend, for your care and activity, which have brought me
this pleasing and most unlooked for result. And I beg you, if
you know any family representative of Mr. Fraser, to express my
sense of obligation to that departed man. I feel a kindness not
without some wonder for those good-natured five hundred
Englishmen who could buy and read my miscellany. I shall not
fail to send them a new collection, which I hope they will like
better. My faith in the Writers, as an organic class, increases
daily, and in the possibility to a faithful man of arriving at
statements for which he shall not feel responsible, but which
shall be parallel with nature. Yet without any effort I fancy I
make progress also in the doctrine of Indifferency, and am
certain and content that the truth can very well spare me, and
have itself spoken by another without leaving it or me the worse.
Enough if we have learned that music exists, that it is proper to
us, and that we cannot go forth of it.