is apprehensible, and challenges a
painter. I can brag little of my diligence or achievement this
summer. I dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on every
knowable in nature; but the arrangement loiters long, and I get
a brick kiln instead of a house.--Consider, however, that all
summer I see a good deal of company,--so near as my fields are to
the city. But next winter I think to omit lectures, and write
more faithfully. Hope for me that I shall get a book ready to
send you by New-Year's-day.

Sumner came to see me the other day. I was glad to learn all the
little that he knew of you and yours. I do not wonder you set so
lightly by my talkative countryman. He has brought nothing home
but names, dates, and prefaces. At Cambridge last week I saw
Brown for the first time. I had little opportunity to learn what
he knew. Mr. Hume has never yet shown his face here. He sent me
his Poems from New York, and then went South, and I know no more
of him.

My Mother and Wife send you kind regards and best wishes,--to you
and all your house. Tell your wife that I hate to hear that she
cannot sail the seas. Perhaps now she is stronger she will be a
better sailor. For the sake of America will she not try the trip
to Leith again? It is only twelve days from Liverpool to Boston.
Love, truth, and power abide with you always!

--R.W.E.

LVII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 26 September, 1840

My Dear Emerson,--Two Letters of yours are here, the latest of
them for above a week: I am a great sinner not to have answered
sooner. My way of life has been a thing of petty confusions,
uncertainties; I did not till a short while ago see any definite
highway, through the multitude of byelanes that opened out on me,
even for the next few months. Partly I was busy; partly too, as
my wont is, I was half asleep:--perhaps you do not know the
_combination_ of these two predicables in one and the same
unfortunate human subject! Seeing my course now for a little, I
must speak.

According to your prognosis, it becomes at length manifest that I
do _not_ go to America for the present. Alas, no! It was but a
dream of the fancy; projected, like the French shoemaker's fairy
shoes, "in a moment of enthusiasm." The nervous flutter of May
Lecturing has subsided into stagnancy; into the feeling that, of
all things in the world, public speaking is the hatefulest for
me; that I oug