What part of it I shall do, I cannot yet tell. As
soon as I know how to arrange my journey best, I shall write
you again.
Yours affectionately,
R.W. Emerson
CXXIV. Carlyle to Emerson
Rawdon, Near Leeds, Yorkshire
31 August, 1847
Dear Emerson,--Almost ever since your last Letter reached me, I
have been wandering over the country, enveloped either in a
restless whirl of locomotives, view-hunting, &c., or sunk in the
deepest torpor of total idleness and laziness, forgetting, and
striving to forget, that there was any world but that of dreams;
--and though at intervals the reproachful remembrance has arisen
sharply enough on me, that I ought, on all accounts high and low,
to have written you an answer, never till today have I been able
to take pen in hand, and actually begin that operation! Such is
the naked fact. My Wife is with me; we leave no household
behind us but a servant; the face of England, with its mad
electioneerings, vacant tourist dilettantings, with its shady
woods, green yellow harvest-fields and dingy mill-chimneys, so
new and old, so beautiful and ugly, every way so _abstruse_ and
_un_speakable, invites to silence; the whole world, fruitful yet
disgusting to this human soul of mine, invites me to silence; to
sleep, and dreams, and stagnant indifference, as if for the time
one had _got_ into the country of the Lotos-Eaters, and it made
no matter what became of anything and all things.
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