and finished the writing of my
Lectures on Heroes. This is all the rustication I have had, or
am like to have. I am now over head and ears in _Cromwellian_
Books; studying, for perhaps the fourth time in my life, to see
if it be possible to get any credible face-to-face acquaintance
with our English Puritan period; or whether it must be left
forever a mere hearsay and echo to one. Books equal in dulness
were at no epoch of the world penned by unassisted man.
Nevertheless, courage! I have got, within the last twelve
months, actually, as it were, to _see_ that this Cromwell was one
of the greatest souls ever born of the English kin; a great
amorphous semi-articulate _Baresark;_ very interesting to me. I
grope in the dark vacuity of Baxters, Neales; thankful for here
a glimpse and there a glimpse. This is to be my reading for
some time.

The _Dial_ No. 1 came duly: of course I read it with interest;
it is an utterance of what is purest, youngest in your land;
pure, ethereal, as the voices of the Morning! And yet--you
know me--for me it is _too_ ethereal, speculative, theoretic:
all theory becomes more and more confessedly inadequate, untrue,
unsatisfactory, almost a kind of mockery to me! I will have all
things condense themselves, take shape and body, if they are to
have my sympathy. I have a _body_ myself; in the brown leaf,
sport of the Autumn winds, I find what mocks all prophesyings,
even Hebrew ones,--Royal Societies, and Scientific Associations
eating venison at Glasgow, not once reckoned in! Nevertheless go
on with this, my Brothers. The world has many most strange
utterances of a prophetic nature in it at the present time; and
this surely is worth listening to among the rest. Do you know
English Puseyism? Good Heavens! in the whole circle of History
is there the parallel of that,--a true worship rising at this
hour of the day for Bands and the Shovel-hat? Distraction
surely, incipience of the "final deliration" enters upon the poor
old English Formulism that has called itself for some two
centuries a Church. No likelier symptom of its being soon about
to leave the world has come to light in my time. As if King
Macready should quit Covent-Garden, go down to St. Stephen's, and
insist on saying, _Le roi le veut!_--I read last night the
wonderfulest article to that effect, in the shape of a criticism
on myself, in the _Quarterly Review._ It seems to be by one
Sewell, an Oxford doctor of n