All things are breaking up here, like Swedish Frost in the end of
March; _gachis epouvantable._ Deep, very serious eternal
instincts, are at work; but as yet no serious word at all that I
hear, except what reaches me from Concord at intervals. Forward,
forward! And you do not know what I mean by calling you
"unpractical," "theoretic." _0 caeca corda!_ But I have no room
for such a theme at present.
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* "A new Spirit of the Age. Edited by R.H. Horne." In Two
Volumes. London, 1844.
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The reason I tell you nothing about Cromwell is, alas, that there
is nothing to be told. I am day and night, these long months and
years, very miserable about it,--nigh broken-hearted often. Such
a scandalous accumulation of Human Stupidity in every form never
lay before on such a subject. No history of it can be written to
this wretched, fleering, sneering, canting, twaddling, God-
forgetting generation. How can you explain men to Apes by the
Dead Sea?* And I am very sickly too, and my Wife is ill all this
cold weather,--and I am sunk in the bowels of Chaos, and scarce
once in the three months or so see so much as a possibility of
ever getting out! Cromwell's own _Letters and Speeches_ I have
gathered together, and washed clean from a thousand ordures:
these I do sometimes think of bringing out in a legible shape;--
perhaps soon.
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