--R.W. Emerson
CXLVIII. Carlyle to Emerson
Chelsea, 7 May, 1852
Dear Emerson,--I was delighted at the sight of your hand again.
My manifold sins against you, involuntary all of them I may well
say, are often enough present to my sad thoughts; and a kind of
remorse is mixed with the other sorrow,--as if I could have
_helped_ growing to be, by aid of time and destiny, the grim
Ishmaelite I am, and so shocking your serenity by my ferocities!
I admit you were like an angel to me, and absorbed in the
beautifulest manner all thunder-clouds into the depths of your
immeasurable a ether;--and it is indubitable I love you very
well, and have long done, and mean to do. And on the whole you
will have to rally yourself into some kind of Correspondence with
me again; I believe you will find that also to be a commanded
duty by and by! To me at any rate, I can say, it is a great
want, and adds perceptibly to the sternness of these years: deep
as is my dissent from your Gymnosophist view of Heaven and Earth,
I find an agreement that swallows up all conceivable dissents;
in the whole world I hardly get, to my spoken human word, any
other word of response which is authentically _human.
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