e that this
humor proceeds from a despair of finding a contemporary audience,
and so the Prophet feels at liberty to utter his message in droll
sounds. Did you not tell me, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, sitting upon
one of your broad hills, that it was Jesus Christ built Dunscore
Kirk yonder? If you love such sequences, then admit, as you
will, that no poet is sent into the world before his time; that
all the departed thinkers and actors have paved your way; that
(at least when you surrender yourself) nations and ages do guide
your pen, yes, and common goose-quills as well as your diamond
graver. Believe then that harp and ear are formed by one
revolution of the wheel; that men are waiting to hear your
epical song; and so be pleased to skip those excursive involved
glees, and give us the simple air, without the volley of
variations. At least in some of your prefaces you should give us
the theory of your rhetoric. I comprehend not why you should
lavish in that spendthrift style of yours celestial truths.
Bacon and Plato have something too solid to say than that they
can afford to be humorists. You are dispensing that which is
rarest, namely, the simplest truths,--truths which lie next to
consciousness, and which only the Platos and Goethes perceive. I
look for the hour with impatience when the vehicle will be worthy
of the spirit,--when the word will be as simple, and so as
resistless, as the thought,--and, in short, when your words
will be one with things. I have no hope that you will find
suddenly a large audience. Says not the sarcasm, "Truth hath
the plague in his house"? Yet all men are _potentially_ (as
Mr. Coleridge would say) your audience, and if you will not
in very Mephistophelism repel and defy them, shall be actually;*
and whatever the great or the small may say about the charm of
diabolism, a true and majestic genius can afford to despise it.

------------
* This year, 1882, seventy thousand copies of a sixpenny edition
of _Sartor Resartus_ have been sold.
-------------

I venture to amuse you with this homiletic criticism because it
is the sense of uncritical truth seekers, to whom you are no more
than Hecuba, whose instincts assure them that there is Wisdom in
this grotesque Teutonic apocalyptic strain of yours, but that 't
is hence hindered in its effect. And though with all my heart I
would stand well with my Poet, yet if I offend I shall quietly
retreat into my Universal relations, wherefrom