to undergo very essential
modifications, such as will not only alter, but _reverse_, its most
characteristic features, before I can esteem either it or the advocacy
of it anything less than abominable.

But where are you now with relation to that Thomas Carlyle whose "Sartor
Resartus" I read twenty years ago afoot and on horseback, sleeping with
it under my pillow and wearing it in my pocket till pocket and it were
worn out,--I alone there in the remote solitudes of Maine? We have both
travelled far since then; but whither have you been travelling? The
whole wide heaven was not too wide for you then; but now you can be
jolly in your "nutshell." Then, you held spiritual, or human, values to
be final, infinite, absolute, and could gibe in your own incomparable
way at the besotted conventionalism which would place commercial values
above them; now, who chants with such a roaring, pious nasal at that
apotheosis of Property which our modern commercial slavery essentially
is? Then, with Schiller, you desired, as a basis of political society,
something better than a doctrine of personal _rights_, something more
noble, human, unitary, something more opposed to egoistic
self-assertion, namely, a doctrine of _powers_ and their consequent
_duties_; now, a scheme of society which is the merest riot or
insurrection of property-egotism reckons you among its chiefest
advocates. Then, you struck heroically out for a society more adequate
to the spiritual possibilities of man; now, social infidelity _plus_
cotton and polite dining would seem to suffice for you.

Ah, Heaven! is anything sadder than to see a grand imperial soul, long
worthy and secure of all love and honor, at length committing suicide,
not by dying, but by living? Ill it is when they that do deepest homage
to a great spirit can no longer pray for the increase of his days; when
there arises in their hearts a pleasure in the growing number of his
years expressly as these constitute a deduction from the unknown sum
total of those which have been appointed him; and when the utmost
bravery of their affection must breathe, not _Serus_, but CITO _in cadum
redeas!_ O royal Lear of our literature, who have spurned from your love
the dearest daughter of your thought, is it only left us to say, "How
friendly is Death,--Death, who restores us to free relations with the
whole, when our own fierce partialities have imprisoned and bound us
hand and foot"?

Royal you are, royal in pi