roperly have done it; but she
having failed, I consider myself answerable for her debts. I am now
trying to do it in the midst of commercial noises, and with a quill
which seems more ready to glide into arithmetical figures and names of
gourds, cassia, cardamoms, aloes, ginger, or tea, than into kindly
responses and friendly recollections. The reason why I cannot write
letters at home is that I am never alone. Plato's--(I write to W.W.
now)--Plato's double-animal parted never longed more to be reciprocally
re-united in the system of its first creation than I sometimes do to be
but for a moment single and separate. Except my morning's walk to the
office, which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am
never so. I cannot walk home from office, but some officious friend
offers his unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am
pestered. I could sit and gravely cast up sums in great books, or
compare sum with sum, and write "paid" against this, and "unpaid"
against t'other, and yet reserve in some corner of my mind "some darling
thoughts all my own,"--faint memory of some passage in a book, or the
tone of an absent friend's voice,--a snatch of Miss Burrell's singing,
or a gleam of Fanny Kelly's divine plain face. The two operations might
be going on at the same time without thwarting, as the sun's two motions
(earth's I mean); or as I sometimes turn round till I am giddy, in my
back parlor, while my sister is walking longitudinally in the front; or
as the shoulder of veal twists round with the spit, while the smoke
wreathes up the chimney. But there are a set of amateurs of the Belies
Lettres,--the gay science,--who come to me as a sort of rendezvous,
putting questions of criticism, of British Institutions, Lalla Rookhs,
etc.,--what Coleridge said at the lecture last night,--who have the form
of reading men, but, for any possible use reading can be to them but to
talk of, might as well have been Ante-Cadmeans born, or have lain
sucking out the sense of an Egyptian hieroglyph as long as the pyramids
will last, before they should find it. These pests worrit me at business
and in all its intervals, perplexing my accounts, poisoning my little
salutary warming-time at the fire, puzzling my paragraphs if I take a
newspaper, cramming in between my own free thoughts and a column of
figures, which had come to an amicable compromise but for them. Their
noise ended, one of them, as I said, accompanies me home,